“Last Train to Gertrude Stein” by Sandra McDonald – 3.7
Asimov's, July/August 2026 Claudine is over a thousand years old, an immortal who dies and is reborn again and again in the marshes along the Seine, waking each time in…
“Roma Delenda Est” by Alan Smale – 3.4
Asimov's, July/August 2026 An aging Archimedes, kidnapped from newly-fallen Syracuse, is dragged into Hannibal's war camp in Italy in 212 BC. Hannibal has no interest in siege engines—his is a…
“Gumchew” by Zack Be – 3.5
Asimov's, July/August 2026 Harlan Bah drives his elderly father, Simeon, to a Fed-Corp clinic in a frozen Center City to finally get "gummed" — a childhood-standard neurogel brain implant that…
Brother Adalbert’s Last Shift by Karol Lagodzki – 3.7
In a domed underground city called New Chicago, built after the surface became uninhabitable, Brother Adalbert spends his final day as caretaker of a single ancient oak tree enshrined in…
A Flame in the Dark by Sam W. Pisciotta – 4.0
Set in 1775 in the American wilderness, A Flame in the Dark is told through the journal entries and letters of Annette Lacroix, a French naturalist living on the frontier…
“Unspeakable Knowns” by Donald McCarthy – 3.5
Asimov's, May/June 2026 The story unfolds in first person through the voice of an unnamed Secretary of Media for Maldrove, the oldest human colony world, distinguished by its pervasive red…
“The Sky Above The Earth Below” by Steve Rasnic Tem – 3.7
Asimov's, May/June 2026 Grace is twenty-nine years old, American-born, and supervising three experimental carbon capture beaches along the Chilean coast for the Civilian Climate Corps. The beaches are surfaced with…
“The Language of Machines” by Betsy Aoki – 3.7
Asimov's, May/June 2026 The story is narrated by Rach, one of the New Humans — beings engineered by sentient spiral machines from the corpses of Old Humans who once tore…
“The Girl Who Stole Life” by Zhou Wen, tr. Xueting C. Ni – 4.0
Asimov's, May/June 2026 The story opens with an unnamed narrator standing in an ominous alley, the scent of decay seeping from behind a door, contemplating a woman whose choices led…
“Sophie Simpson’s Whizz-Bang Day at World War I” by Dale Bailey – 2.9
Asimov's, May/June 2026 Sophie Simpson is a sharp, plain, perpetually skint girl from a single-parent household who wears her cousin Mary’s ill-fitting hand-me-downs and eats cheese and pickle sandwiches every…