GigaNotoSaurus is back on hiatus for the remainder of the year, and my best wishes go to LaShawn Wanak and her team in closing a difficult year and trying to shore up the foundation for 2026. I’ve been pretty impressed with their published fiction this year, but I know the finished product is only the tip of the iceberg. 

So for the last two months of 2025, my monthly magazine review will just be Clarkesworld. 

Clarkesworld

The November 2025 issue of Clarkesworld hits both length extremes, as its seven stories include a novella over 20,000 words and a pair of shorts under 1,500 in addition to the three short stories and one novelette in their more typical 4,000-11,000 range. 

It opens with The Stone Played at Tengen by R.H. Wesley, the story of a renowned player of Go in Imperial Japan being brought on to advise the emperor on what appears to be a game written in the stars and initiated by a higher power. But the mysterious celestial competition is inextricably entwined in the lead’s mind with games he’d play against his wife and with the life-threatening illness she suffers. It’s not a story that will answer all the questions, but there’s a real spark of humanity at its core. 

D.A. Xiaolin Spires has published a lot in Clarkesworld, and so I’ve read a lot of her work. I’ve often found it ambitious but somewhat opaque, but the novelette Jade Fighter brings something quite different to the table. If anything, it feels more like a cozy sci-fi tale, with the lead testing a virtual martial arts program and coming across an NPC who seems to have become self-aware. One could easily see such a revelation spawning a thrilling fight against the program-owner, or perhaps a twisting tale of mysterious revelation. But “Jade Fighter” takes a different tack, with a slow-building friendship and both major figures encouraging the other toward goals of personal growth. There’s not much drama, nor are there earth-shattering stakes, but it’s an enjoyable, comforting read that delivers characters that are easy to cheer for. 

But for me, the highlight of the issue—and by a significant margin—is The Apologists by Tade Thompson. It’s framed as an investigation into a potential serial murder in a London setting, but the narration is dotted with hints that there’s something not quite so straightforward about the entire enterprise. The subtle way of wrong-footing the reader reminds me of the weird sci-fi/horror of one of my favorite contemporary writers, Thomas Ha. And while Thompson delivers a piece that’s stylistically and tonally quite different from Ha’s oeuvre, he displays a similar skill in building a sense of uneasy anticipation that makes the story very difficult to put down. It all builds to a climax that may not break new ground in the genre but offers plenty of closure both in the major plot arc and in the individual character journeys that make it up. This is my favorite novella of 2025 so far. Do not miss it. 

Returning to short stories, Trees at Night by Ramiro Sanchiz, translated by Sue Burke, takes on some elements of cosmic horror but diverges sharply in its framing. Instead of dealing directly with the experience of the ineffable, it takes place mostly in a Sanatorium full of people who have witnessed the incomprehensible and are struggling to piece together what to do next. Like “The Stone Played at Tengen,” it leaves the reader with a fair helping of ambiguity, but there’s a very human story at its heart, with the lead—a Sanatorium librarian—advising a young patient while repeatedly returning to the confusing experiences of his own family. 

Prerequisites for the Creation of a Possible Predicted World by Chisom Umeh spotlights an organization that builds immersive simulations of ways it was once believed the world would go. There’s lots of exploration of the principles guiding the technology itself, but it shares the stage with the lead’s fascination with a technology so alien to anything in his backwater home, as well as his romancing of one of the lead developers. There are intriguing pieces here, but it feels a bit overstuffed for its 4,800 words, with the ultimate resolution coming a bit too suddenly for my tastes. 

The following story, Ratlines by Brent Baldwin, is a pint-sized revenge story taking place in a world where prisoners—often unjustly sentenced—are made to choose between manual labor camps and serving as disembodied computers. The scant thousand words leading up to the final conclusion detail the personal and societal horrors in a series of discrete snippets of a few sentences each. As someone who tends to avoid extremely short stories, revenge narratives, and “look at how bad the future could be” stories, this one was triply not for me, though I certainly understand that my tastes are outside the genre mainstream on those elements, and it may well be a winner for a different audience. 

The final story in the issue, The Fire Burns Anyway by Kemi Ashing-Giwa, is similarly short and also features a dismal future full of exploited labor. The big difference from the previous piece comes in the intense character focus, as Ashing-Giwa’s tale has no revenge element and honestly spends little effort building any sort of plot at all. Instead, it’s a second-person lead detailing the challenges and injustices endemic to their chosen career, not as a sci-fi dystopia checklist but in an intensely emotional way that sustains the piece even without much real narrative. 

The non-fiction section begins with a science article that takes a very optimistic perspective on scientific developments meant to halt the aging process, with arguments as to how that should be built into far-future science fiction. The section closes with an editorial that answers four reader-submitted questions, including one on international sci-fi that is one of the reasons I find Clarkesworld so easy to recommend. In between are interviews with a pair of writers who have published in Clarkesworld previously and have novels coming out quite soon. K.A. Teryna’s debut will initially be available only to Russian-language readers, but it takes place in the world of the fascinating-but-often-confusing “Serpent Carriers,” though she promises a more traditional narrative structure in the novel. Meanwhile, R.T. Ester, whose “Anais Gets a Turn” was among my favorites last year, is publishing The Ganymedan this month, featuring themes of propaganda, disparate attitudes about AI, and the costs of justice in a world without a remotely adequate system. As so often happens with these interviews, it’s a book that wasn’t at all on my radar but suddenly sounds to be worth a serious look.

November Favorites

• The Apologists by Tade Thompson (novella, Clarkesworld)