“Oliana’s Skull” by Robert Reed – 2.9
Asimov's, July/August 2026 Mineas Bad grows up a gifted athlete in the City of Saints, a mortal metropolis on the shore of the Sea of Giants inside the Great Ship,…
“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…
“Rope” by Michael Kelly – 3.0
Bourbon Penn #38, April 2026 On a gray, electric December beach, the narrator — a quietly isolated, self-described loner who visits the shore to manage dark moods — encounters a…
“Atomic Chess” by Josh Pearce – 2.6
Bourbon Penn #38, April 2026 Set during the Cold War, “Atomic Chess” weaves together two parallel narratives — one aboard a Soviet nuclear submarine, the other in a Havana café…
“Rocky Mountain Gothic” by Ev Datsyk – 2.8
Augur Literary Society, #8.3 November 2025 In an unnamed mountain town bordered by dense forest, a class of second graders is supernaturally summoned into the woods during recess. The forest…
“Ascension” by P.L. McMillan – 2.3
Apex, February 2026 Sam is a competitive climber who lost their left arm in a factory accident — distracted by a voice note from their partner Abithe while initiating a…
“This Obituary Has Been Redacted” by P.C. Verrone – 2.8
Strange Horizons, March 2026 Told entirely through the pages of a fictional gay magazine called Ganymede’s Men, P.C. Verrone’s story unfolds across a series of obituaries, letters to the editor,…
“Welcome to Heroism” by John Wiswell – 2.7
Uncanny, March/April 2026 In a near-future world where superhumans exist alongside ordinary people, a viral app called The Dare quietly rewires the relationship between spectacle, power, and collective action. Every…
“Those Who Left History” by Wanxiang Fengnian, trans. Stella Jiayue Zhu – 2.6
Clarkesworld, March 2026 “Those Who Left History” is a multi-voiced speculative fiction told through interleaved diary entries, journalistic reportage, and future historiography. Its central conceit is “spatial closure” technology —…
“First Human Ghost on Mars” by R.L. Meza – 2.6
Clarkesworld, March 2026 The narrator is the ghost of an astronaut — later revealed to be Captain Rogers — who died of a stroke before the Mars mission launched but…