Welcome to the second month of the new feature in which I dip into various magazines for a couple stories in a given issue. I can’t really call them magazine reviews, since I’m only reading a small portion of the magazines in question, but I also want to give the venues a little bit more of a spotlight than they’d get in my monthly Short Fiction Miscellany post. And so we have Magazine Minis. This month, that will include Reckoning 8, the November/December 2024 issue of Asimov’s, and Uncanny Magazine Issue Sixty.
Reckoning
Reckoning is an annual magazine dedicated to creative writing on environmental justice, with a mix of prose and poetry that’s released online over the course of months. According to my spreadsheet, I’d read one Reckoning story from its first seven years of existence, and it didn’t prepare me for how impressed I’d be with Reckoning 8.
I did read one novelette from Reckoning 8 before I started the Magazine Minis, Where the Water Came From by Jeff Hewitt, which I discussed briefly in my August round-up. It’s a compelling story about organized labor and family separation over the course of long-haul space travel, with plenty of fascinating elements but an ending that could’ve used more time to breathe.
The rest were new to me this month, starting with Within the Seed Lives the Fruit by Leah Andelsmith. It’s the story of a Black family trying to keep their farm through the generations, despite plenty of prejudice in external institutions that could see decades of work wiped away with the slightest of missteps. And while the story does indeed span decades, it feels more like a small-scale character study than a generational battle, standing out immediately for the lovely descriptions of the main character going through the day-to-day work that keeps things growing, even as changes in the family put more and more responsibility on her shoulders. The speculative element has the flavor of magical realism, only accentuating a gorgeously-wrought, personal tale.
I’m fairly open about my struggles investing in especially short short fiction, but The Last Great Repair Tech of the American Midwest by Ellis Nye uses its sparse word count beautifully, styled as an obituary that does a remarkable job of capturing the main character through a series of vignettes spanning less than two thousand words. There’s not much plot to be found, but it’s plenty heartfelt and does a lot of worldbuilding in a short space, painting a plausible near-future in which technological expertise is dying and those who can make things work are a rare and welcome sight.
A Move to a New Country by Dan Musgrave immediately jumps out for the names written in Osage orthography (with Romanizations in footnotes), for all that they didn’t render on my computer screen. It follows an ecological expert working to find the right mix of plant and animal species to provide environmental balance in extremely limited space aboard a ship leaving a dying Earth, all the while dealing with his grandmother’s refusal to join him on the journey and the tense atmosphere among others in the project leaving various family members behind. It’s just the kind of personal, near-future sci-fi that I find so effective in the short story format, and “A Move to a New Country” delivers a heartfelt and affecting family story against the backdrop of massive social changes that echo so much of the upheaval in the history of the Osage.
Asimov’s
About a year ago, I experimented with cover-to-cover reads of Asimov’s and often found myself slogging through stories that never engaged me from the beginning. But lately, I decided that six dollars per issue was a small enough commitment that I could pick and choose my reading without the pressure to justify the expense by reading every single story, and my recent experience has been really fantastic.
I read three stories in the November/December 2024 issue, with the star undoubtedly being Death Benefits by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which honestly may be the best novella I’ve read all year. It’s a story that owes a lot to military science fiction but approaches it from a different angle, centering not the soldiers themselves but a series of people who lost loved ones in a seemingly endless conflict. There’s a little bit of critique of the powers-that-be and the way they’ve dragged so many people into fighting, but mostly, the novella consists of the little stories of the civilians who loved soldiers. And I love those kinds of stories.
Many of the perspective segments are one-off, with a first-person private investigator serving as the major repeat point-of-view that gives the novella a bit more structure than a mosaic story. It comes together in a way that’s morally complicated but makes for a cohesive and compelling whole, tying together all those beautiful one-off segments into a really tremendous novella. There have been a lot of people looking to read novellas outside the Tordotcom ecosystem lately, and if you’re one of them, “Death Benefits” would be a wonderful place to start.
A bit less ambitious but no less well-executed is the short story Deep Space Has the Beat by Mary Robinette Kowal. It’s a fairly compact “find the saboteur” story, as a scientist pioneering technology that stores energy in nightclub dance floors has to hunt down the person hacking her systems in the middle of a meeting with a key investor. Along the way, there’s enough character backstory to make the lead easy to cheer for, and Kowal does a lovely job building and releasing the tension to deliver a satisfying read.
The novelette Murder on the Orion Express by Peter Wood promises a locked room murder mystery on a generation ship and largely delivers, though some of the political machinations involved sometimes make it feel like the key players are ignoring the obvious solution (and, in fairness to the key players, there are political reasons to ignore the obvious solution in this case). The interpersonal storyline doesn’t land quite as well, with the protagonist’s ex taking on quite a bit of page time despite not being a particularly interesting character, but the whole was entertaining enough.
Uncanny
Looking through the table of contents of Issue Sixty of Uncanny, two stories immediately jumped out at me: a pair of novelettes by authors I’ve enjoyed quite a bit in the past.
A Stranger Knocks by Tananarive Due is a period horror that quickly builds the atmosphere, with a mysterious stranger bringing an offer that seems too good to be true to a pair of Black newlyweds in 1920s Washington DC. In what should come as no surprise, the offer is indeed too good to be true, and what unfolds is a monster story that doesn’t stray too far from genre standards but executes them at a high level.
Another Girl Under the Iron Bell by Angela Liu uses a Japanese setting and a mythos that is a little bit less familiar to me personally—to the point that I didn’t even realize the character of Kiyohime had been well-established in folklore for centuries—but is similarly well-executed. I’m not especially fond of revenge stories, and this one features vengeance plots in both the backstory and the main story, but it quickly draws the reader into the perspective of the demon protagonist and nicely mixes the backstory and main story into a cohesive whole.
October Favorites
- Within the Seed Lives the Fruit by Leah Andelsmith (short story, Reckoning)
- Deep Space Has the Beat by Mary Robinette Kowal (short story, Asimov’s)
- A Move to a New Country by Dan Musgrave (short story, Reckoning)
- The Last Great Repair Tech of the American Midwest by Ellis Nye (short story, Reckoning)
- Death Benefits by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (novella, Asimov’s)