Two Magazine Minis in a month? In this economy? 

Earlier this month, I took a look at some stories from OnSpec and The Deadlands that were included in the Hugo packet. But publishers didn’t stop releasing new things just because I was reading stories from last year. And guess what? There are some new releases that I really wanted to read! So I did, and now I’d like to share my thoughts about a handful of sci-fi and fantasy tales from Adventitious, Kaleidotrope, and Reckoning. 

Adventitious 

The fourth issue of Adventitious comes out next week, and I was fortunate enough to receive an advance copy. After flipping through the contents, three stories jumped out and demanded a closer read, starting with the very first entry, A Game of Go by P.A. Cornell. Is it because of the opening lines, because I’ve enjoyed the author in the past, or because the title being included in the title of one of my favorite stories of the year? Who can say. Could be all three. 

At any rate, this particular story is written from the perspective of a smart house, commanded to prioritize a child above all else after one mother had disappeared and the other struck out to find her. Years later, that child is in his teens and has never been outdoors, and the smart house finds herself deteriorating, compelling her to teach him to survive outside before she fails entirely. As the title suggests, each segment takes inspiration from Go strategies, but ultimately, this is a parenthood story, and the lead’s dedication and the earnest naïveté of her charge make it an excellent read. 

Another story that jumped out based on the title alone was The Grammar of Jespersen-b by Holly Schofield, reprinted here after original publication in OnSpec. It’s a very short tale starring settlers on a world in the midst of a geomagnetic reversal. The lead’s family had found themselves displaced over and over on Earth and had always steadied themselves by finding north. But here, there’s not much north to be found, and fellow settlers are no help, spending most of their time in virtual reality. From that description, one may make an educated guess as to how the story will go, but it remains a worthwhile journey to learn how to settle even when the usual tools are absent. 

Finally, Ruth Joffre’s A Hole in My Heart the Shape of the Multiverse is a plot-light tale in which the lead explores a house with intermittent connections to various parts of the multiverse. Unable to find her way home, she instead spends her time searching for an alternate version of herself, the second-person subject of the story who has spent her years righting historical wrongs, regardless of the people displaced as the changes echo through history. That may sound like the start of a time travel thriller, but as I said in the open, this one is more about looking for connection to person and place than it is about averting multiversal disaster. Perhaps there are moments where it could use a bit more plot structure, but it’s an engaging ride all the same. 

Kaleidotrope

A couple short stories caught my attention from the Summer 2026 issue of Kaleidotrope, starting with one by an author I’ve been enjoying immensely of late: Hark the Herald by Louis Inglis Hall. It starts as an archeological expedition to investigate what seem to be angelic remains. But one major character has aims beyond simply new discovery, aims that are wrapped up both in politics and in personal ambition. The expedition itself is compelling enough—there is, after all, a reason this story caught my eye. But the layers of motivation and potential fallout develop a bit quickly for my taste. I’ve seen Hall tackle such themes adroitly in longer form, but this one may need some expansion to realize its full potential. 

Next, A Family Forged by Aaron Emmel ostensibly features clockwork children, but it isn’t long before something even darker is revealed, setting a course for a story that’s less about conceptual exploration and more about the desperation to break free from horrible captivity. 

Reckoning

In addition to their tenth annual issue, Reckoning released a special issue this year, with It Was Paradise focusing on war, conflict, and environmental justice. I poked around both tables of contents and found a pair of intriguing stories from both It Was Paradise and Reckoning X. 

Both of the former deal with the ways people are forced to change during war, but they approach the topic from quite different perspectives. In the Foothills by Rajiv Moté digs deep into the mind of a father trying to keep his daughter intact, both physically and psychologically, in a conflict that allows no place of safety. On the other hand, Gayathri Kamath’s Akka is told from the perspective of a child whose aunt is the one undergoing wartime transformation. 

The latter certainly has plenty to say about the way that war can make someone unrecognizable, both to themselves and to those closest to them, and it does so without the unrelenting darkness that one may expect from such a topic. But it’s the heart-wrenching perspective of the former that really blew me away. “In the Foothills” makes it achingly clear just how difficult mere survival will be. And on top of that, there’s the attempt for the lead to shield his daughter from the pressures that will transform her into a creature of wartime. It’s emotionally devastating and spotlights so many decision points where there is simply no right answer. Even in a pretty strong set of stories, this one stands out.

The two tales I picked from Reckoning X also had some distinct similarities, with impeccable vibes and powerful scene-level writing but some opacity that can make for disorienting reads and some difficulty in piecing together the overarching stories. The Over-Sea by Jamie McGhee is a brutal tale of colonialism in which an island’s native people are forced to tear out an ecologically vital plant with healing properties in order to deliver the short-term value of indigo crops. With so many of their own people suffering, the lead scrapes together the money to travel overseas and study medicine, only to be faced with rampant discrimination, struggles to pay the academic fees, and inconsistent communication with their homeland, which may be made an example to ward off burgeoning revolutionary attitudes elsewhere. I wanted this story to coalesce a little bit more than it does, but the eschewing of proper names gives it both a feeling of universality and a sense of the ease in which the colonized can be erased from history, all the while touching on so many different aspects of colonial oppression, from outright murder to ecological damage to prejudice to expectations about the ways minorities will behave when studying in majority culture institutions. There’s plenty of power here. 

There’s also power in J.R. Staples-Ager’s Dr. _____ and His Thousand Children, which also eschews proper names and often loses large swathes of text in a story framed as the recreation of diary entries written by one of the genetic experiments of the unnamed doctor. Like “The Over-Sea,” it can be brutal, with the protagonist part of a group considered entirely disposable and no shortage of guts and viscera attesting to that fact. It also delivers a strong sense of the way horrors can be erased, with the narrator referencing other documents that are apparently lost to history. But enough details survive to generate emotional investment and give some sense of resolution. Like the previous entry, it’s a story that leaves me wanting more but that also has me planning a reread—there’s plenty here, and I could easily see it rewarding a second look. 

July Favorites

• The Over-Sea by Jamie McGhee (short story, Reckoning)
• In the Foothills by Rajiv Moté (short story, Reckoning)
• Dr. _______ and His Thousand Children by J.R. Staples-Ager (short story, Reckoning)