I’m halfway through another year of reading through each issue of Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus, and I might’ve found a new favorite of 2025 from the latter. Let’s take a look!

Clarkesworld

After several seven-story issues, this month’s Clarkesworld returns to what had been a fairly standard eight, with six short stories and two novelettes. Four of the authors were ones I’d enjoyed immensely in the past, and three were new-to-me, so I was excited to give this issue a try. 

It opens with Emily of Emerald Starship by Ng Yi-Sheng, a sci-fi retelling of a Singaporean play with which I was unfamiliar. The main conflict here derives from a romance between the ordinary protagonist and a man from a complicated, powerful family. But while the potential in-law difficulties are well-established, there’s a darker turn that I found both compelling and a little bit underexplored—I would’ve liked this one to go a little longer. 

If an Algorithm Can Cast a Shadow by Claire Jia-Wen is the story of a mother going to increasingly desperate lengths to algorithmically recreate her late son’s mental state before his demise, all wrapped up in a fraught relationship with a high-achieving elder daughter. It’s a compelling interpersonal story that digs into the limitations of technology, with a noticeable thread about a community’s attempts to keep up appearances. This is another story where I might’ve liked a bit of a deeper dive, but there’s a lot here in what is perhaps the most compelling piece in the issue. 

If there’s a challenger for most compelling piece, it’s In the Shells of Broken Things by A.T. Greenblatt, in which a disabled protagonist braves a harsh landscape to try to find the real story behind a family friend’s abandonment of the domed habitat where she had played such a vital role in their continued survival. This is as much travelogue as investigation, with plenty about navigating a hostile world while having to plan around bodily weakness, but there’s also some interpersonal drama to unfold, with lots of deeply buried hurt feelings on all sides. 

The novelette The Eighth Pyramid by Louis Inglis Hall takes place in a world which has been adapted to humanity after the disappearance of the race who came before. The protagonist and her family seek to learn more in the face of censorious leadership, at great cost to themselves. It’s a story about changing the accepted narrative, but in what is becoming a theme for this issue, it’s one where I wanted a bit more definition to the struggle. 

The issue’s second novelette, Faces of the Antipode by Matthew Marcus, sees a scholar traveling among the planet’s indigenous population to try to determine why they cut down trees that could be so beneficial in fighting pollution—pollution to which the indigenous people notably contribute almost nothing. It’s not hard to see where this one is going, but it’s well-written and is worth the read for fans of this particular sort of story. 

The Last Lunar New Year by Derek Künsken is another sustainability story, in which a variety of post-human races debate what is to be done about the destruction of Earth’s moon. The main conflict here is a bit abstract for my tastes, though it may appeal to fans of strange peoples and timelines measured in eons. 

The Last to Survive by Rita Chang-Eppig is another post-human story, featuring a world in which people have abandoned their physical bodies for digital existences that interact with the outside world via drones or rented shells. Ultimately, it’s a story about aging and memory in a different context than is typical in those stories, though it builds slowly to the major theme with a heavily fandom-informed opening. 

In what is becoming a second theme for this issue, Outlier by R.L. Meza features more post-humans, this time subjects of an experiment hybridizing humanity with spiders. The story is told from the perspective of one of the experiment subjects, whose life on the outside was bad enough that she initially doesn’t much mind being an experiment. But as she observes herself and those around her, she begins to see the scientists in a different light, one that pays off the tale’s horrifying premise. 

The editorial outlines a couple marketing-related goals Clarke is pursuing, and the science article digs into the development of Jovian settings in sci-fi and how they’ve changed as science has progressed. The interviews feature a pair of authors with pretty heft catalogues, Elizabeth Bear and Matthew Kressel, the latter of which certainly put a couple more stories on my TBR. 

GigaNotoSaurus 

This month’s GigaNotoSaurus tale is the novelette The Starter Family by Sage Tyrtle. It introduces a nightmarish dystopian setting—a feminist horror in the vein of The Stepford Wives or The Handmaid’s Tale—but differentiates itself from the subgenre standards by telling the story exclusively from the perspective of one of the most privileged members of society. It starts in the lead’s youth before skipping ahead through a series of core experiences that define his relationship with his land. From the reader’s perspective, there’s never a question of whether the world is horrible but instead a question of whether there will be a point where the next horror causes the lead to risk his own well-being by taking action outside those mandated by his society. All told, it makes for a compelling and often harrowing dive into the mind of a character torn between his moral compass and his own comfort and security. 

June Favorites 

• The Starter Family by Sage Tyrtle (novelette, GigaNotoSaurus)