My Magazine Minis came early this month, but I’ve still got a regular magazine review to share. Let’s take a look at the new short fiction in the July 2026 issues of Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus. 

Clarkesworld

Though Clarkesworld does an excellent job platforming new authors, I’ve been reading long enough to recognize quite a few names in the average table of contents, and seeing Thomas Ha, K.J. Khan, R.L. Meza, and R.S.A. Garcia had me excited about giving this issue a try. 

The issue opens with a Khan short story, The Life and Times of the Extraterrestrial Potoo. Travelers happening upon strange extraterrestrial life tend to make for stories that are right up my alley, so I was excited to read this one, and I’m happy to report that it delivers. This is not strictly a first-contact story, as the titular potoos are known to humanity before the events of this tale. But they are not known personally to the lead, a solitary collections worker whose route sees him traveling alone for long stretches. The opportunity for alien companionship leads him to ignore the standard procedure for potoo encounters, and that companionship radically alters his beliefs both about the potoos and about the nature of his work. It’s not a novel premise within science fiction, but it’s a classic for a reason, and Khan spins an excellent tale that’s easily among my favorites of the month. 

Cliff’s Girl by Fiona Moore makes for the ninth and longest entry in the post-apocalyptic sequence featuring the tinkerer Morag and the lives—both human and robotic—she touches. Those new to the series can either circle back to the start with “The Spoil Heap” or else just read out-of-order and trust the author to repeat key elements of backstory. It’s quite possible that the references to past stories are what pushes this entry over the boundary from short story into novelette, but these reminders aren’t especially obtrusive to those who have read the previous entries. The story here is much of a kind with the other eight, with a new problem to solve with ingenuity and interpersonal skills rather than with weapons. It’s a formula that has worked well, and those who enjoyed the other eight will doubtless enjoy “Cliff’s Girl,” which finds Morag in the unusual position of herself being the one whose judgmental impulses must be fought. 

The issue’s second novelette, Focus by Carlos Hernandez, introduces a group of fabulously wealthy bird-watchers who find themselves knit together more tightly than they’d wished by the ghost of one of their fellows. Immediately after his death, they have found themselves plagued by innumerable bird’s eye views—views that both threaten to drive them mad and leave them terrified of the exposure of their secret thoughts. The story that follows is a gradual unraveling of what had motivated their deceased compatriot, told from the perspective of the one who knew him best. 

The longest entry in the issue, The Animator and the Glazer by Ju Chu, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu, directly confronts the way AI-generated art threatens to destroy the livelihoods of so many artists. It stars a glazer, seeking to make his fortune by finding a skilled animator and applying his own glazing skills to make the animations impossible to copy, thus preventing this new talent from drowning in a sea of AI-generated copies of their style. With so little work left outside the blue-collar fields, this endeavor carries enormously high stakes for both glazer and animator, and when obstacles invariably come, there are few options remaining for the desperate leads. It’s a story that centers the concept but still delivers interpersonal drama as it unfolds. 

Thomas Ha inevitably spins tales that are both weird and unsettling, and Our Revels Now Are Ended is no exception. It opens with the lead in a simulated library, being interrogated by a man who hopes that candor will unlock crucial information. But the lead knows little that seems of interest, and his musings into the situation provide more questions than answers, both for himself and his interrogator. Ha stories rarely spell out every important detail, and while this one provides an unsettling atmosphere and asks some fascinating questions, the uncertainty stemming from so many loose threads keeps the story from building a powerful moment of convergence. But even without a ending that elevates what came before, that atmosphere and those questions make this story is well worth the read. 

R.S.A. Garcia takes an enormous swing with This Is an Emergency Broadcast, a structurally ambitious story that at its best delivers incisive social commentary on multiple levels and at its worst feels like Channel-Surfing: The Story. There’s no central narrative voice here, with the titular emergency broadcast being just one in a sea of fragments from a host of different sources. While the story rarely stays on one broadcast for more than a paragraph or two—and usually offers no clear demarcation of the shifts—its piecemeal narrative still stitches together a disturbing picture of a fragmented society plagued by greedy tech companies whose legal might makes it tremendously difficult for the families of those it exploits to even discover the damage, let alone find justice. 

The issue closes with Nesting Behavior of Imported Species Troglodytes aedon on Planet Americearth by R.L. Meza, told from the perspective of an avian lead roosting in a tree within a domed habitat, observing both other animals and what readers will quickly come to recognize as humans. It’s an entertaining tale with the feel of a sci-fi horror story written from the perspective of the monster—or at least a partisan of the monster with little sympathy for humanity. 

The nonfiction side includes an editorial reflecting on the anniversaries of both the conversation that led to the creation of Clarkesworld and the heart attack six years later that nearly claimed the editor’s life. As the title says, July is for survivors. 

The science article discusses octopus brains, with shoutouts to a couple heavyweight authors—Ray Nayler and Adrian Tchaikovsky—who have delved into octopus intelligence in recent novels. And the two interviews help the readers get to know artist Tran Nguyen and author Meg Elison, the latter of whom is reaching outside her normal style with the satirical Foundling Fathers. 

GigaNotoSaurus 

This month’s GigaNotoSaurus tale is the novelette The Portishhead Tunnel by J.D. Moyer, which takes place mostly in the enormous complex accessed through the titular tunnel. It’s a marvel of bioengineering, built by the secretions of mollusks and guided by a distributed intelligence that’s a cousin to both AI and hivemind. While there are exceptions, it functions largely as a post-scarcity tale, with the guiding mind able to supply all of life’s necessities at no charge. But the lack of scarcity does not mean that all human conflict is immediately solved, and dealing both with bad faith residents and good faith visitors not quite willing to trust the system pose their own problems. The interpersonal plot is enough to keep the story going, but the aspirational worldbuilding stands out most.

July Favorites

• “Our Revels Now Are Ended” by Thomas Ha (short story, Clarkesworld)
• “The Life and Times of the Extraterrestrial Potoo” by K.J. Khan (short story, Clarkesworld)