Travel and an unusually hefty short fiction project this month left me with relatively little time for miscellany, and what time I had was mostly spent in search of the lucky 10,000, focusing on acclaimed 20th century sci-fi that I’d somehow yet to read. And wouldn’t you know it, I found some great stuff! Let’s take a look, starting as always with short fiction:

Short Fiction

For starters, I reviewed Clarkesworld and the entire longlist for the 2017 Hugo Award for Best Short Story (justice for “That Game We Played During the War”!). I won’t recap those reviews here, but you can read them.

August Favorites

• Jeffty is Five (1977 novelette) by Harlan Ellison. This one racked up four different awards, and I can see why–it’s absolutely tremendous, focusing on childhood nostalgia through a long-term friendship with a boy who literally never ages. It starts out intriguing and gets more and more uncanny as the story progresses, all leading up to a stunning conclusion. This was my first old story of the month, and it set a bar that none of the others could reach.
• Itsy Bitsy Spider (1997 short story) by James Patrick Kelly. A woman goes to visit her estranged, aging father only to find him under the care of a robot programmed to act as her childhood self. Here the uncanny is up front, with the story then slowly building into a more grounded, personal, and affecting tale of a fractured family.

Strong Contenders

• Houston, Houston, Do You Read (1977 novella) by James Tiptree Jr. A disorienting, non-linear tale of contact between an all-male astronaut crew and a female-dominated society. There are times that the men feel a little over the top, but, well. . . gestures at Alpha Male Influencers. It takes a little while for the story to grow into itself, but it’s excellent once it does. And while there are story reasons for the men to act as extreme versions of themselves, it’s interesting in the way it explores three pretty different male archetypes.
• Rachel in Love (1987 novelette) by Pat Murphy. A tense look into the mind of a girl whose mind has been put into the body of a chimp, trying to make her way in a world without any protectors and reconcile the complicated feelings that stem from two very different psychological inputs.
• The Jaunt (1981 novelette) by Stephen King. For all that he’s a horror writer, this is sci-fi with some horror undertones more than horror outright. It does a nice job establishing an increasingly unsettling atmosphere, but the ending feels a bit too unsubtle, and there are times where it’s hard to parse what’s being said in the frame story and what’s simply interior story. Still, the setup is good enough to make this well worth the read.

Others I Enjoyed in August

• The Last Question (1956 short story) by Isaac Asimov. One of the most famous stories in the history of the genre, and I can certainly understand what people love about it, but it reads to me something like an overgrown flash. It’s a story that’s driven almost entirely by a memorable ending, with the leadup being fairly repetitive setup to prepare for the big finish. I’ll remember the ending, but twist-driven stories aren’t often all-timers in my mind.
• Every Ghost Story (2025 short story) by Natalia Theodoridou. How did a current year story get in here? It’s the story of a group of people at a camp designed to help them process their relationship to the spectres who have suddenly become visible en masse. It’s told in a contemporary, colloquial voice but packs in some emotional depth, even with an ending that’s not too difficult to see coming.

Novels and Novellas

Reviews Posted

• The River Has Roots (2025 novella) by Amal El-Mohtar. A cross between a Fae story and a murder-ballad, well-written but not aiming for a lot of thematic depth.
• These Memories Do Not Belong to Us (2025 novel) by Yiming Ma. A constellation novel told via eleven different stories centering around an authoritarian Chinese empire and their control over the distribution of memories.

Other August Reads

• The Underground Railroad (2016 novel) by Colson Whitehead. An alt-history story about escaping from slavery that surprised me by leaning much more into the themes and alternate societies than the central narrative. Full review to come.
• House of the Rain King (2025 novel) by Will Greatwich. A multi-perspective fantasy standalone about the return of a god and a society that’s generally not ready and largely out for their own interests. Full review to come.
• The Summer War (2025 novella) by Naomi Novik. A very short, original fairy tale that nails the voice. Full review to come.
• The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025 novel) by Stephen Graham Jones. A vampire story centered on injustice against Native Americans, less focused on the mystery and more on the grotesque buildup to the final conclusion. Full review to come.
• Knife Children (2020 novel) by Lois McMaster Bujold. A short novel in the world of The Sharing Knife, keeping with the general series trend of centering on interpersonal disputes that are resolved more with negotiation than with might. Full review to come.
• The Nine (2017 novel) by Tracy Townsend. A gritty fantasy in the underbelly of an alternate Earth city that has just found a document with profound religious implications that has attracted the interest of several factions working at cross-purposes. This one should be more well-known. Full review to come.

Misc.

No new miscellaneous posting, as I posted my SPSFC reviews and Hugo ballots last month, but it’s worth noting that both announced winners in August.