The last two months of Magazine Minis were enormous, but as the TBR churns along, the May entry will be much shorter, dipping into just a pair of magazines: Adventitious and Lightspeed. 

Adventitious

I received an Advance Review Copy of Issue Three of Adventitious, and as usual, I scanned through to see which stories immediately caught my eye. This time around, there were three: two short stories and one novelette, all of them centering on death and grief. Also, while I didn’t read it and cannot say whether or not it features similar themes as the three I did read, I’ll note for others that this issue includes a full novella by M.A. Carrick, set in the world of the recently released The Eye of the Leviathan. 

I started with M.R. Robinson’s The God of the Leftmost Door, a reprint previously published in an anthology of portal stories. This one is told in second-person to the god of the entryway, one of myriad small gods working the in-between spaces separating the world of the living and that of the dead. It isn’t any of the lead’s business, but there’s one woman who has lingered years longer than anyone else, and you can’t help asking why. What follows is a tale of companionship on two levels, with a cozy, burgeoning romance between two small gods along with recollections of a figure who refuses to be separated from her partner, even in death. 

The Laws of Thermodynamics as Applied to My Dead Mom by Christopher Blake features a lead who had been deeply skeptical of the afterlife reckoning with the continued presence of the titular dead mom. Unlike the Robinson story, which featured close companions at its core, this one is more a tale of finally beginning to understand someone only after they’re dead. And while that may be a trope that lends itself to the bittersweet, the execution here leaves quite a bit of hope moving forward. 

But my favorite of the three I read from this issue was the novelette All of My Tomorrows by L.D. Colter. Again, it starts with death, seeing the lead in Colorado for the funeral of a close friend and avid outdoorsman. But when the deceased’s daughter disappears after tossing out dangerously reckless ideas for tribute, it compels the lead to confront the strange magic that has left her terrified of cameras ever since a harrowing experience working as a photographer in Indonesia decades earlier. While it wraps up a hair more neatly than I’d prefer, this one is exceptional in the way it builds the atmosphere, bringing both the lead’s panic and her regrets vividly to life. 

Lightspeed

As always, the May issue of Lightspeed features four flash fictions and four longer works. As an inveterate flash-hater, I rarely sample the former, but two of the latter—both from authors I’ve loved in the past—jumped out and ascended my TBR. Sarah’s Laugh by Melissa A. Watkins explores a terrifying future in which small company towns with no oversight to speak of are carved out of U.S. cities. With the passing of information tightly controlled, it’s difficult for most people to understand the horrors, let alone begin to fight them. But a child’s laugh provides a magical impetus for much more mundane changes in a story that’s less interested in supernatural triumph and more in the actions of ordinary revolutionaries and the hard-won shifts in public attitudes. 

The novelette The Test of Time by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, on the other hand, largely eschews changes on a grand scale to zero in on one student working through an infamous weed-out class at an elite time travel university. It gestures at elements that could be major plot points in a novel—the lead’s suspicion that her grandmother may have been a secret time-travel assassin, the philosophical issues surrounding branching timelines created by changes to the past, specifics of attempts on the lives of infamous historical figures—but keeps its primary focus on a protagonist questioning her abilities and her motivations as she tries to manage a class that nearly everyone fails the first time. I’d have loved to read a novel-length expansion of this, which is both a mark of feeling slightly dissatisfied with the ending and of being thoroughly sucked in to the lead’s perspective. It simply does a wonderful job bringing to life the little details of embarking on new academic pursuits, and it takes seriously the myriad complications of time travel. 

May Favorites

• “All of My Tomorrows” by L.D. Colter (novelette, Adventitious)
• “The Test of Time” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (novelette, Lightspeed)