For the second month in a row, my Magazine Minis post will be a five-zine blitz. Well, I suppose not technically the second month in a row, since I didn’t get this one up before the calendar flipped to May, but they were read two months in a row. Point is, I found five magazines outside my normal cover-to-cover rotation with multiple stories that I wanted to dig into. So let’s have a look at some short fiction from Asimov’s, Kaleidotrope, Podcastle, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny. 

Asimov’s

A quick perusal of the May/June 2026 Table of Contents brought three stories to my attention, one novelette and two short stories. The novelette, The Girl Who Stole Life by Zhou Wen, translated by Xueting C. Ni, features a pair of characters pursuing educational and career opportunities usually closed to those of their social class. But the difficulty of scrubbing telltale markers from their accents push one into dangerous neurological experiments to facilitate more adept mimicry—research that will endanger her relationships with both friends and family. 

Greg Egan’s short story Alpha Gal is a figure-it-out sci-fi about the organism that causes allergy to red meat, here spreading despite the absence of its typical carriers. It’s a well-executed tale, but despite some background color about a cult devoted to the molecule, it’s not one that pushes beyond typical expectations of that sort of story. 

The Language of Machines by Betsy Aoki is a twisty first-contact story from the perspective of machine-made, organic intelligence trying to survive an encounter with the machine-phobic old-timey humans. There’s plenty of time dedicated to getting the communication right, but this one is more about figuring out who to trust than about bridging a language gap. 

Kaleidotrope

A pair caught my eye from the spring 2026 issue of Kaleidotrope. Ma’anu Wei: What We Know Thus Far by Eliezra Schaffzin tries to piece together the strange adventures of a woman who claims to have visited an unnamable other land, via her own dubious accounts and records from former school and family acquaintances. It’s a story that didn’t come together to wow me at the finish, but it delivers a wonderfully atmospheric reading experience and a fascinating setting where spoken language is impossible. 

Diamonds by Grant Stone, on the other hand, is a “miners found weird stuff” story, told via quickly-forgotten interviews after the fact, proceeding along familiar lines that blur between sci-fi and cosmic horror. It’s another atmospheric tale that comes together perhaps a bit more than “Ma’anu Wei,” though within a subgenre where there’s very little expectation of every single detail being explained. In this sort of story, it’s all about the execution, and “Diamonds” is told in a way that sucks the reader into the strangeness and keeps them there to the finish. 

Podcastle

Podcastle releases stories one at a time rather than having discrete issues, but they had a pair that stood out to me this spring that I’ll bundle together here. The Worth of Ashes by Amanda Helms considers a world where the ashes of the dead contain enough of their essence to commune with the living, but also enough to perform some degree of labor. The impoverished lead sees herself forced to sell the bulk of her sister’s remains at exorbitant prices in order to feed her children, who by and large don’t think the bread is worth the price. And so she is spurred to find a way to keep her family alive while preserving enough of a beloved Auntie. This one jumped out at me as a potential grief story, but while it develops more as a tale of finding creative fantasy solutions in difficult circumstances, it’s still satisfying. 

Next up, Ananconfabulation by Mar Vincent sets up as a “community in an apocalypse(?)” story that immediately put me in the mind of Naomi Kritzer’s “The Year Without Sunshine.” But here, the environmental hazards are much less explicable, and the subsequent pulling together less grounded and more dreamlike. With their houses buried in falling dust and no adults in sight, a group of schoolchildren dig tunnels to each other’s windows, pool supplies, and try to determine what they know for sure about the world that was and how it has and will change moving forward. This is not a story that will answer the big questions, but it remains noteworthy for the way it digs into the fear of the unknown and the way the various characters approach indefinite isolation in a strange world. Like “Diamonds,” this one is a winner purely on atmosphere and the way it keeps the reader in the mind of the lead. 

Strange Horizons

Strange Horizons also publishes just one story in each issue (along with some poetry and non-fiction), so again, I’ll bundle a pair of mini-reviews together here. Skiinfolk by Jamie McGhee digs into some fascinating themes of race, technological development, and cultural standards of beauty in a story in which most people hide their natural body behind fleshy avatars engineered to impress. It also hinges on drunken nightclub hookups and the messy relationships that follow—a plot point that I know is a thing people experience in real life but where I have a hard time sympathizing with the lead’s perspective. For me, the concepts felt more real than the characters, but your mileage may vary. 

Ferdison Cayetano tends to write mind-bending short fiction that’s very much worth the read, so I was excited to see The Houses of the Stars in Heaven pop up in the Table of Contents. As expected, it is a strange one, set in an afterlife in which expert navigators are called upon to help a group of godlike beings navigate to the place where they can save the Universe. It’s a compelling tale with a dreamlike quality—weird and wondrous in a way that’s quite the ride but tends to slip away after reading. 

Uncanny

Issue Sixty-Nine of Uncanny features one story that had me interested purely after seeing the title and author, another that brought me in with the premise, and a third that I read after a recommendation from a book club friend. 

We’ll start with What We Mean When We Talk About the Hole in the Bathroom by Angela Liu, which had me intrigued just by the title and author and only kept going from there. As a genre reader may expect, the titular hole is a portal to another world, but the strangeness of that world (which is indeed strange!) isn’t the focus so much as the way its appearance represents one more point of contention in a relationship full of disagreements and misunderstandings. It’s a story where I might’ve liked a little more closure, but the little glimpses into the microfractures that shape a marriage over time make it very much worth the read. 

Chimera by Anjali Sachdeva is another family drama with a fantastical backdrop, although in this case, the speculative premise bears a bit more of the weight. Ultimately, it’s the story of the way a mother lost a son, not realizing until too late that her sharp words about his fascination with environmentally-friendly transhumanism is a potential breaking point and not merely a single point of disagreement in an otherwise warm relationship. The narrative momentum here is directed towards the realization, which provides a bit of closure but has the feel of a story that could serve as prologue to a bigger tale. 

Finally, Theodora Goss’ The Woman Who Stole Flowers has an almost magical realist flavor, a vignette about a strange old woman in Budapest that offers a little glimpse into old magics still alive. I tend to prefer a bit more plot in my stories, but it’s a lovely piece all the same. 

April Favorites

• Diamonds by Grant Stone (short story, Kaleidotrope)
• Ananconfabulation by Mar Vincent (short story, Podcastle)