It’s been a bit of an unusual reading month, with a little bit less novel-shaped reading time than usual but quite a bit more places to carve out some short fiction. Between that and my attempt to free up the holiday season posting schedule, this month’s Magazine Minis is my biggest ever, with a blitz through stories from Apex, Asimov’s, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Kaleidotrope, and Uncanny.

Apex

For its 150th issue, Apex Magazine chose a delightfully unusual theme, with an issue featuring exclusively authors who had never before been paid for a short story publication. Two of the four jumped out as particularly intriguing to me, and I was excited to give them a read. My Song at the Conclave of Many Sorrows by Daniel A. Oluremi sees the lead’s lands invaded by a cunning people with superior weaponry and a lust for conquest. As the ruler, only she can communicate with the spirits at the titular conclave. But turning their mockery into genuine aid will be difficult, and it will be costly. It’s an engaging story about personal sacrifice to save one’s people in a heavily African-coded setting.

Orion and His Moon by J.S. Oriel is the story of a sentient supply ship forced into high-stakes decisions resting on unreliable memory during a series of crises on a rescue mission to an ailing human colony. There’s plenty of plot-related tension in the short-term, but the main driver of the story comes in the lead grappling for meaning in the midst of a mission that could be either vital or pointless, all while building a more concrete relationship with a satellite that’s much more than he expected. 

Asimov’s

The November/December 2025 issue of Asimov’s had four stories that initially caught my attention, including three by authors I’d highly enjoyed in the past. Mudfoots by Eric del Carlo is a short novelette in which a lead from the boondocks covertly returns home to aid an alien father figure in the aftermath of an attack that had destroyed so much of what he’d known. Interspersed with the present-day storyline are wistful remembrances of a lost love that increasingly take center-stage in a story that mostly drops the attack plot in favor of meditations on community in a place the lead and many of his fellows had been trying to escape. 

Another (much longer) novelette, Solemnity by Mark D. Jacobsen, heavily wrestles with religion in a story about the excavation of an advanced alien society that had suddenly and catastrophically burned itself out, apparently precipitated by the death of their god. The lead, a software archeologist cut off from her family after leaving her childhood religion, is there for the opportunity to attack unprecedented problems and is none too happy to see a priest pushing the team to seriously consider whether the god may have been real. But the priest’s increasing confidence spawns religious doubts of his own, and the group’s most strident atheist spends more time dismissing others’ questions than seriously considering whether the supernatural could have been a factor. While the story feels most sympathetic to the lead’s perspective—occasionally leading to conclusions that are a touch too confident or side characters that don’t quite come to life in the same way—it really dives into the central question besetting the entire cast, carefully considering all angles and driving home the emotional stakes.

The last two pieces I read from this issue deal with loss of memory. Greg Egan’s novella Spare Parts for the Mind is a dementia story, in which a retired gamemaker undergoes a series of expensive, experimental treatments to bring back a level of mental facility that had years since abandoned him. It does a wonderful job digging into the nitty gritty of the treatments and how they send him oscillating between an extreme impulsiveness that makes him a danger to himself and a sort of sluggish calm that stifles creativity, bringing the trials of both states vividly to life. A bit less vivid is the debate about AI reconstructions of deceased loved ones, which lurks in the background through much of the novella without getting enough attention to really catch the reader’s imagination as a true B Plot. Still, the main story offers enough to make this an engaging read. 

The other memory story I read is the much shorter Catch a Tiger in the Snow by Ray Nayler. It’s meditative in a way that I’ve come to associate very strongly with Nayler’s work and that almost always works wonderfully for me, with very little action and a lot of pondering the personal implications of new developments. In this case, those developments are twined together, one interpersonal and one technological. The former is a relationship between the lead and a much more financially stable woman in the memory-modification business. And the second is the whole enterprise of memory modification, with exploration of how it’s done, what sorts of possibilities it allows, and whether anyone could tell it had been done to them. Like with so much of Nayler’s work, there’s a bittersweet tone that lends emotional weight to the more philosophical elements, all while the abstract science-fictional elements inevitably are made concrete in the life of the lead. 

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Beneath Ceaseless Skies publishes only two stories per issue, so instead of picking out a handful from a particular magazine issue that caught my eye, I’ve saved up intriguing options for the last couple months and grouped them together in this review. And we’ll start with one with plenty of thematic parallel to the Egan and Nayler Asimov’s stories: The Forgotten by Trae Hawkins. It’s told in two timelines, both written in second-person. In the present, the lead is seeking fortune recovering minerals from a land that gradually strips memory from those who inhabit it. In the past are all the reasons the lead might welcome losing memory, with a rebellion failed and loved ones lost. An interaction with one who has chosen to live in memory-stripping land may proceed along expected lines, but there’s plenty to explore about the way that even bad memories can shape a person. 

The novelette Woman Like Stone Like Water by Malda Marlys also plays with memory, though in a more subtle way that’s revealed only slowly as the tale unfolds. It’s a prehistoric tale following a woman living alone under a waterfall ever since the attack by wild dogs that had nearly taken her life years before. From the first paragraph, it’s building to some sort of confrontation with one of the tribes who periodically visit her waterfall, with that engagement revealing layer after layer of the inexplicable magic by which stones seem to shape themselves to her needs. The narrative is thoroughly grounded in the lead’s perspective, yet simultaneously manages to capture an almost mythic voice that combines with the characterization to make the story a truly engrossing read, even with the relatively simple plot. 

Another novelette, The Third Movement of Time by RJ Taylor, sees a physics professor trekking toward strange and magical lands in search of her brother, a renowned artist who had disappeared entirely without warning. The hunt is less like piecing together clues from a mystery and more like following a trail of breadcrumbs, though it’s one that gradually reveals more and more about the lead, her brother, and the student assistant aiding her on her journey. Still, it keeps up the mystery well enough, and while it may come down a hair too sympathetic to the artist’s perspective, it does a nice job forcing the lead to truly consider things through her brother’s eyes, even when she doesn’t want to. 

The last two Beneath Ceaseless Skies stories I read this month somehow both involve war and mail. Postman, Soldier, Traitor by Vijayalaxmi Samal does so immediately, with the soldier lead being pressed into delivering a letter by a dying young enemy. His reasons are partially nostalgia, partially magic, and partially opaque even to himself, and the journey they drive forces him to once again begin to see the humanity in those around him, planting the seeds of a transformation into a new sort of person. 

Beyond the Fold by Holden Lee, on the other hand, leaves the postal elements until the back half of the story. The lead and her forbidden lover are working toward careers as master origamists. While magical paper animals can serve in various parts of the empire—including mail delivery—nothing comes close to the prestige or challenge of designing new weapons to support the ongoing war effort. But while the lead is happy to throw herself into her work without asking too many questions, her companion cannot trust the imperial propaganda, opening a rift between them that cannot be healed unless the lead is willing to face some difficult facts. It’s a beautiful piece in which the constant threat of death or dismemberment keeps the tension high throughout. 

Kaleidotrope

A couple stories caught my attention from the Fall 2025 issue of Kaleidotrope. I’d already read two Tanvir Ahmed tales of rebellion with Middle Eastern settings and mythic voices, and while both were good reads and one even hit a Year’s Best anthology, neither forced me to mark his name down as a must-read author. But the opening of Wilayat in Seven Saints sucked me in immediately, with its intriguing structural conceit—as promised, it tells of seven saints, with each tale shaping the narrator into a bolder actor in the framing narrative—and a tremendous style that engages directly with the reader while nailing the mythic voice. As the layers unfold, this one doesn’t let up a bit, with each piece revealing more and more about both the narrator, his mysterious interlocutor, and the dangerous political setting in which he hunts for stories. It’s not a story that makes for easy choices, but neither is it hopeless, with the seven tales offering inspiration for the future even in the midst of a difficult present. 

The novelette What Am I This Time? by Scott Edelman, on the other hand, takes a science fiction premise, though one that’s no less intriguing. The lead is a rehab professional, with his consciousness transferred into the bodies of addicts to work through the pain of withdrawal while they relax in his skin. But this body seems different than his past jobs, and the physical and the psychological are increasingly bleeding into each other. It’s a strong premise, but the foreshadowing is a bit too clear to maintain the air of mystery, and the ending offers some solid closure but doesn’t elevate the tale that came before. 

Uncanny

Issue 66 of Uncanny Magazine featured two stories that I made sure not to miss this month, starting with the novella The Lure of Stone by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I picked this one on the strength of Moreno-Garcia’s storytelling and my past experience with her work, and while this is more of a classic adventure fantasy than the period pieces I’d read previously, the quality of storytelling shines through. There’s witchery, a mouthy familiar, and a growing, sorcerous army threatening both the lead and the villages through which she travels. If that sounds like your sort of thing, this will be a worthwhile read. 

A bit more ambitious is the non-linear Whale Fall of Yours by M.M. Olivas, which interweaves memories of both the beginning and the end of a romance doomed by illness and selfish decisions with a harrowing story of an exploratory space mission that’s happened upon a dying leviathan gobbling their main power sources. Despite a crisis that could easily come from an action-adventure sci-fi, this one is more personal, diving into love, memory, and regret, bringing the lead character vividly to life in a way that makes her uniquely suited to a leviathan encounter.

October Favorites

• Wilayat in Seven Saints by Tanvir Ahmed (short story, Kaleidotrope)
• Woman Like Stone Like Water by Malda Marlys (novelette, Beneath Ceaseless Skies)
• Catch a Tiger in the Snow by Ray Nayler (short story, Asimov’s)
• Whale Fall of Yours by M.M. Olivas (short story, Uncanny)