With Hugo nominations in the books, I’ve more or less wrapped up my 2024 reading, so it’s on to 2025 short fiction. As always, that starts with my monthly reviews of Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus. 

Clarkesworld

The March 2025 issue of Clarkesworld features a novella-length centerpiece, with three stories under 8,000 words on either side. And—unusually—for me, it was very much a tale of two halves. 

The issue opens with From Enceladus, with Love by Ryan Cole, written from the perspective of a stowaway aboard one of the sought-after ships carrying people away from a dying Earth and toward a settlement that still has hope for the future. But the discovery of a naive AI in a society that’s thoroughly terrified of them puts both human and AI at risk of discovery. For those who read Cole’s Clarkesworld debut “Waffles Are Only Goodbye for Now,” the engaging writing style and lovable AI character will come as no surprise. I wanted a little more from the lead’s backstory, but it’s well woven into a satisfying main story. 

Pollen by Anna Burdenko, translated by Alex Shvartsman, has far and away my favorite hook in the issue, and the story lives up to its initial promise. The lead is among the few survivors of a mission to an unassuming planet that had surprised the expedition with deadly, hallucinogenic pollen. And so she must try to keep the air clear long enough for rescue to come, all the while surrounded by visions of her dead family. If that sounds like the recipe for a fascinating dive into the mind of a lead simultaneously grieving and trying to survive, it absolutely is. There’s a strong emotional core here, and the story grabbed me immediately and truly never let go. 

Tlotlo Tsamaase’s work tends to walk right on top of the line between disorienting (compliment) and disorienting (pejorative), and that doesn’t change a bit in Mindtrips, in which the lead is forced—to be a well-adjusted member of society—to confront buried trauma by taking pills that make her relive incidents from her past. What follows is a mind-bending trip through memories of child abuse and second-guessing about how to stand up for her past selves, interspersed with snippets from an unhealthy relationship in the present day. It’s never easy, but often powerful. 

In contrast to the mind-bending novelette that preceded it, the novella Those Uncaring Waves by Yukimi Ogawa spends a bit too much time explaining what’s going on, presenting a world in which patterns on the skin alter the flow of internal bodily fluids, putting the artist leads in a role much like unsanctioned doctors. But their attempts to help a persistently suicidal woman–who had survived thus far only by immersion in seawater–opens up questions deeper than any they’d previously considered. 

I often prefer sci-fi short fiction to fantasy short fiction because I find that fantasy tends to spend so much time worldbuilding that it struggles to get into the story, and such was my problem here. The story spends enough of the word count explaining how everything works that it’s difficult to truly connect to the characters or their goals. It may be a hit for magic system aficionados looking for a story on the blurry boundary between sci-fi and fantasy, but this wasn’t the one for me. 

Unfortunately, after a centerpiece that didn’t really click for me, the back half didn’t recover the high level of the first three stories. Hook and Line by Koji A. Dae is a generation ship story with plenty of focus on the ways in which the space-born generations do or do not remember Earth. This theme immediately reminded me of one of my all-time favorite novelettes, Sarah Pinsker’s “Wind Will Rove,” and. . . well, that’s a difficult story to live up to, especially at well under half the length. Here the focus is on mediums trying to hold onto the ancestral spirits trailing the ship through space, but perhaps more than anything, it’s the story of the last of her kind trying to train an apprentice on a ship that simply doesn’t care anymore. There’s not really enough time for the overarching remembrance theme to really take hold, but there’s a solid interpersonal story at its heart. 

The last two stories both feel a little like an assortment of flash pieces in a trenchcoat. There is a through line in Ren Zeyu’s The Sound of the Star, translated by Jay Zhang, but it’s mostly an exploration of drastic differences in sensory perception in various peoples on various planets. It should appeal to those who enjoy imagining wildly different ways of experiencing the world, and how that shapes society, but none of the treatments are long enough to really stick with me. 

It’s much the same with Funerary Habits of Low Entropy Species by Damián Neri, though Funerary Habits contains even less continuity, instead presenting three high-level xenofictions of around a thousand words each. Again, this will likely appeal to fans of brief explorations of non-human perspectives, but as someone who likes my sci-fi short fiction a bit longer, none of them stuck with me longer than a brief “oh, that was interesting.” 

The editorial this month announced the winners of the Reader Poll, with Isabel J. Kim’s “Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole” (my personal vote) taking home an expected victory in the short story category. The longer fiction category, on the other hand, did not go to either of the Clarkesworld stories that I rated among the top three of the entire year (from any publication)—Thomas Ha’s “The Brotherhood of Montague St. Video” and Rich Larson’s “The Indomitable Captain Holli”—but instead “Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being by A.W. Prihandita, which is indeed also quite a good story! 

This month’s science article talks about the importance of the soil in growing food in space (or on other planets), something that seems entirely obvious and yet covers a lot of details I’d never thought about—including some interesting critique of the science in The Martian. In keeping with the first two issues of the year, the interviews focus on non-writing SFF professions, featuring editor Lee Harris and artist Julie Dillon. 

GigaNotoSaurus 

This month’s GigaNotoSaurus story is a long novelette that came with content warnings for horror and body transformation. I’m not a horror reader, and body horror in particular bothers me, so I considered skipping it entirely. But instead, I decided to try it out, giving myself permission to quickly DNF if need be. 

And I am so glad I gave L.S. Johnson’s Something Rich and Strange a try. It starts with a transformation, with an artist riding a train back to her shunned hometown, her skin slickening all the while. While the reader opens the story in the dark, the lead knows what to expect—she simply has no way to stop it. Returning hope feels partially like a last-ditch attempt to halt the transformation and partially like an opportunity to confront the mother figure who had shepherded so many girls through the change. And while the descriptions are plenty visceral, this story is more than anything a character study of a woman undergoing an unwanted and unstoppable change. 

I kept looking for obvious feminist metaphors, and while there are certainly elements that bear passing resemblance to real life, Something Rich and Strange eschews simplistic interpretations in favor of something complicated and beautiful. This was undoubtedly my pleasant surprise of the month, and possibly of the year. 

March Favorites 

• Pollen by Anna Burdenko, translated by Alex Shvarstman (short story, Clarkesworld)
• Something Rich and Strange by L.S. Johnson (novelette, GigaNotoSaurus)