Chip by D.A. Xiaolin Spires – 3.5
Clarkesworld, February 2026 "Chip" is a thoughtful science fiction story about Mengxiang (Meng), a jobless newcomer to a futuristic city, and their unexpected friendship with an AI robocab named Chip.…
Clarkesworld, February 2026 "Chip" is a thoughtful science fiction story about Mengxiang (Meng), a jobless newcomer to a futuristic city, and their unexpected friendship with an AI robocab named Chip.…
Clarkesworld, February 2026 In a near-future where the "Mindmesh" technology allows humanity to store memories in the cloud rather than biological memory ("lobemeat"), Iris recounts her mission to assassinate billionaire…
Baffling Magazine, Issue 5 April 2025 This poignant short story explores grief, memory, and the different ways people preserve connections to those they’ve lost. The narrator prepares eggplant parmesan using…
Strange Horizons, April 2025 The narrator, Em, marries Minju—the girl who bullied her in middle school—on the same day that “Pandora’s Formula” is published online. This formula is a simple,…
Introduction "Crisis Actors," co-authored by Maddison Stoff and Corey Jae White and published in Strange Horizons in January 2025, represents a significant entry in contemporary speculative fiction's engagement with surveillance…
Strange Horizons, 20 January 2025 In a dystopian near-future America, the Department for a Safe America employs “Watchers” who monitor surveillance feeds across the country, flagging suspicious activity to law…
Introduction In The Dream Hotel (2025), Pulitzer Prize finalist Laila Lalami delivers a chillingly prescient exploration of the intersection between technology, state surveillance, and the human subconscious. Building on her…
Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi is a noir detective novel set in a French colonial city in West Africa during the dry Harmattan season. Plot Overview Boubacar, a down-on-his-luck "chercher"…
Introduction Thomas Ha's "The Patron," published in The Sunday Morning Transport in March 2025, represents a significant contribution to contemporary speculative fiction's exploration of technological mediation in human relationships. Ha,…
The Sunday Morning Transport, March 2025 Thomas Ha’s “The Patron” presents a haunting exploration of commodified human connection through a gig economy service called “the program,” where people hire others…