Am I still catching up on 2024 fiction? Yes. Is it 2025? Also yes. So in between catching up, I’m also reading and reviewing my usual new releases. And let me tell you, there are some good stories out this month.
Clarkesworld
The January 2025 issue of Clarkesworld has fewer stories than usual, mostly because the 5,000-8,000 word sweet spot is entirely absent, with the issue instead consisting of three relatively short short stories and three novelettes near or over 10,000 words. But those longer stories pack a serious punch and make the issue a tremendous read.
As usual, the issue starts with a piece on the shorter end, with When There Are Two of You: A Documentary by Zun Yu Tan offering a conceptual sci-fi styled as a documentary digging into the digital doppelgängers that allow people to collaborate—whether on art or on big decisions in their personal lives—with copies of their own mind. The length doesn’t necessarily allow for a deep dive into the subject, but there are some snippets of lives that provide a compelling window into the ways people diverge from their digital selves.
Child of the Mountain by Gunnar de Winter occupies an ambiguous space between sci-fi and fantasy, with the lead carrying out duties that seem an awful lot like those of a priestess, finding bits of soul and using them to map minds and resurrect minds in a way that feels an awful lot like science. It takes most of the story’s length to orient the reader into what exactly is going on, time that the lead spends coming to the conclusion that more of the same won’t get her to her goals and preparing to strike out in a new and dangerous direction.
The longest story in the issue is also my favorite: Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak. Pak debuted with a pair of high-quality Clarkesworld stories in 2024, but “Never Eaten Vegetables” truly raises the bar. It’s the story of a malfunction on a colony ship housing only embryos, basic supplies, and a powerful AI to guide the journey, but the bulk of the story takes place more than a quarter-century later, as a small group of survivors seeks to scratch out an existence in a land designed for a much larger population. In between her political duties trying to keep the colony running and free from harm at the hands of its powerful stakeholders, the lead dives into the records to try to understand why the AI perpetuated the tragedy that killed so many of her fellows. The result is a powerful unfolding of layer after layer of foul play, moral quandaries, and human and nonhuman people trying their best to manage impossible situations. Full of heart, depth, a fair bit of drama, and some extremely impressive AI characterization, this is one that I’m pretty sure will stick with me all year.
The Temporary Murder of Thomas Monroe by Tia Tashiro provides a second excellent novelette, starting with the resurrection of a young heir killed in a robbery and slowly backtracking through bits of memory to figure out what exactly had happened. It’s a gripping tale from start to finish, one with likable characters and a deeply engaging non-linear plot arc that feels like it would translate particularly well to cinema.
The final novelette in the issue, Beyond Everything by Wang Yanzhong, translated by Stella Jiayue Zhu, features an envoy traveling through mysterious portals into an assortment of nonhuman worlds from which no one has ever returned with their sanity intact, all in hopes of finding the key to ending the wars ravaging the planet. While there is an overarching plot holding it together, this mostly feels like a conceptual story, a series of intriguing examinations into a variety of forms of deeply alien existence.
The issue’s final tale, Autonomy by Meg Elison, tackles safety in autonomous vehicles. But unlike much of the sci-fi on the subject, it’s concerned not with road hazards but with people. In particular, it delves into gendered violence and the ways in which that violence might present itself in a world where the use of self-driving cars is widespread. Fair warning, a significant chunk of this story consists in one particular attempted sexual assault, but Elison builds the tension wonderfully, providing a tight-scope story with some real punch.
This month’s editorial, as is typical for January, reviews the work published by Clarkesworld in 2024, while the science article delves into the forms of intelligence found in the behaviors of termites. The two interviews are with a pair of genre editors, Diana M. Pho and LaShawn M. Wanak, the latter of whom edits my other regular magazine, in addition to being a genre author in her own right. When asked which stories someone should first read when being introduced to the magazine, she cites a couple from before I became a regular reader, but she also singles out my favorite story they published in 2024: “Dead reckoning in 6/8 time.” I may have to circle back to the older ones. And I will continue insisting that Owen Leddy’s 2023 novelette “Old Seeds” has been wildly slept on.
GigaNotoSaurus
January’s long story in GigaNotoSaurus is the (long) short story Behind Glass by Christi Krug, which hops across decades from the battlefields of World War I to a late twentieth century Pacific Northwest childhood. The common thread is one kind fairy who eschews the tricks of her brethren and takes an interest—an unhealthy one, perhaps—in the lives of the humans around her. There were times here where I wanted a little bit more subtlety in the characterization, but the interactions between the key characters are so full of heart that I found myself thoroughly enjoying this touching tale.
January Favorites
- Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak (novelette, Clarkesworld)
- The Temporary Murder of Thomas Monroe by Tia Tashiro (novelette, Clarkesworld).