Early September travel has thrown off my usual reading schedule and has me swapping the order of my regular short fiction reviews. So we’ll save the monthly Clarkesworld review for later and start with Magazine Minis: short reviews of selected stories from the same magazine issues. Today, I’ll be looking at tales that caught my attention from issue 5.1 of khōréō, the September/October 2025 issue of Asimov’s, and the February 2025 issue of Translunar Travelers Lounge. 

Asimov’s

The longest story in this issue of Asimov’s also had one of the most mysterious hooks. The Signal and the Idler by Ted Kosmatka features a man scuffling along with a series of temp jobs who is offered money he can’t refuse to do a seemingly nonsensical job with remarkably heavy security precautions. It’s a slow build to the reveal of just what’s happening behind the scenes, but quality storytelling keeps the reader firmly in the mind of the protagonist, sharing his puzzlement and eagerness for answers. When the answers come, they’re conceptually fascinating and pose the characters a dilemma that’s handled in a careful and satisfying way. 

The other piece in this issue that immediately caught my attention was the novelette The Last of Operation Shroud by Alexander Jablokov, featuring a lead wandering the remnants of a war zone seeking a crew she can’t remember from an operation against a memory-altering enemy outpost. As expected, the story plays with memory in a way that discomfits the reader, and the storytelling is good enough to keep things interesting, but it doesn’t bring the pieces together in a way that really calcifies the story structure in the mind of the reader. 

khōréō

Issue 5.1 of khōréō features three short stories by authors who made my favorites list in 2024, so I was very excited for the issue to go live this summer. I started with a short piece that on paper is everything I tend to hate in short fiction. Cypress Teeth by Natasha King features body horror, gods, and vengeance in a package that barely eclipses 2,000 words. But King writes well enough that I’m willing to try her work even when it’s out of my comfort zone, and “Cypress Teeth” rewarded me in a big way. Yes, it’s all the things that usually don’t work for me, but the prose is just so lush and immersive that the whole thing comes to life in an impressive way, one that touches on horrific elements but doesn’t linger in the grotesque, instead telling a story of rivalry that shaped a land, and one more twist the tale may yet have. 

The Significance Cofactor by H.H. Pak is a second-person tale from the perspective of a far future being whose consciousness has traveled back in time to view the world through the eyes of the husband and father who serves as the story’s audience. There are some touching family moments here, but the moral exhortation comes through so strongly as to obscure some of the subtlety that has made so much of Pak’s work so immersive. 

möbius loop by Samir Sirk Motató examines intense self-loathing through a time travel premise that allows the lead regular meetings with past or future selves. There are flashes of real poignancy in the emotional portrait, but a thinly-sketched speculative element leaves the story as a whole feeling like there was more room to explore.

Translunar Travelers Lounge

I had not read much of Translunar Travelers Lounge in the past, partly because they’re a bit under the radar in general and partly because I’m fond of my emotional struggle stories that may not mesh with their optimistic slant. But Issue 12 offers a handful of stories with punchy hooks for familiar speculative premises, and I decided to take the plunge. A Vertical History of Ramis’ Pillar by Henry Sanders-Wright is a city-wide time loop story, written by one of the loopers to a brother back at home. It details the myriad attempts by residents to handle the loop, ranging from the stereotypical grasping for self-improvement to drunken orgies to murder games to murder cults. It opens in a way that’s compelling enough but ultimately treads too much familiar ground without a lot to make it pop from the broader time loop landscape. 

How to Fail at Book-Smuggling (Across Multiple Timelines at Once) by E. M. Linden also plays with non-standard progression through time, featuring a crew of book smugglers who steal from societies on the verge of collapse and resell to those same societies years later once they begin to yearn for information about their own history. The time travel aspect itself feels a hair too neat, but it’s a story that remains well worth reading for the found family at its heart. It opens after the death of a psychologically abusive captain and slowly unfurls the relationships between crew members as their leader’s shadow begins to fade. The found family may not be the A-plot, but to my eyes, it’s the true star of the show. 

The issue dips into parallel universes with All These Inscriptions Are for Me by Carol Sheina, in which a lonely middle-aged woman working an unfulfilling job while struggling through a divorce finds a bookstore with shelves stocked with publications from parallel universes. Some of those books featuring notes addressed to her, triggering memories from lives she hadn’t lived—many much happier than the one she had. Eventually these inscriptions lead to communication across universes, but with a personal focus and an optimistic bent that reminds me of reading John Wiswell circa 2020. It’s not a story that papers over trauma, but it is one that firmly holds to the hope of better. 

The In-Between Sister by Monte Lin takes another familiar premise, in which everyone seems to forget about the lead’s sister except her. It’s subtly different in that it’s not a pure non-existence story, but rather one where the successful elder sister seems to simply slip to everyone’s mental backburner. But it provides the lead an intriguing puzzle to solve, one that forces her to confront head-on her own complicated feelings about her family. In keeping with the magazine’s optimistic bent, this one ends in a place that’s a touch neat, but the journey is sufficiently gripping with enough family drama to make it my favorite of the lot.

September Favorites

• Cypress Teeth by Natasha King (short story, khōréō)
• The In-Between Sister by Monte Lin (short story, Translunar Travelers Lounge)