Despite leaving my magazine reviews until late this month, I still dipped into multiple sci-fi/fantasy stories from four different magazines, so I have a pretty substantial Magazine Minis. Let’s take a look at tales from Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Kaleidotrope, and Uncanny. 

Apex

Despite not having much of a taste for the shockingly grotesque or horrific, I find that I regularly enjoy Apex Magazine much more than I would’ve expected. And there were a pair from issue 154 with sufficiently intriguing premises to convince me to give them a try. 

Parts and Halves by Alina Ai-Ming Shahzad tells of a part-seller who works with her mother and grandmother to scrape out a living via the exchange of body parts. That’s a premise with some grotesque potential, but I’m often intrigued by bittersweet family stories, and this had the look of one. And while it does live up to its grotesquery, the actual harvesting of body parts is surprisingly understated, set against a capitalistic treadmill that success only begets harder work. Make no mistake, both the desires that people have to modify their bodies and the pieces they must sacrifice are integral to the plot, but they are themselves only pieces of the overall business that feels so inescapable. 

The Light Below by C.M. Sullivan is a second-person tale of an underground society that exerts extreme social control and rapidly burns through workers. It’s a short piece that doesn’t ever pull back the curtain to reveal how society got to be the way that it is, but it remains a compelling small-scale look at a lead beginning to question the foundational axioms of society. 

Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Beneath Ceaseless Skies publishes just two stories at a time, and given that I sample much more than I read, I rarely commit to multiple stories from the same issue. But I broke that trend twice over this month, picking up both stories from the mid-September Issue #466 and two more from the eighteenth anniversary double issue in October. 

The longest of the bunch, the novelette Oh Grave, Thy Victory by K.J. Parker, tells of a research breakthrough to cure death. But in a research setting that feels like alternate universe Catholicism—returning Parker readers will likely recognize other figures from what I can only assume is a favored setting of his—that discovery has ramifications far beyond what the unbelieving researcher foresees. It also has ramifications beyond what the reader foresees in a story that sets up expectations only to flout them, a tale that’s aiming at (and largely hitting) cleverness more than poignancy. 

A bit more emotional is Every Force Evokes a Form by Tom Marcinko, which tells of a world where the bodies of sinners are buried and carefully cultivated until the poisons of their hearts can be harvested and used in defense of the realm. But when two of what used to be the lead’s closest friends are implicated in a crime, some of the requirements set by magic and tradition become much more difficult to carry out. 

The two from the mid-September issue both lean into found family in the face of uncanny creatures with more than a bit of possessiveness. Sous Lumière Aigre by Jonathan Louis Duckworth sees a soft-hearted knife-sharpener and trader of odds and ends find himself the victim of bandits. Soon after, he encounters a wandering young girl who insists on sticking with him. That’s the setup of a familiar tale, and it should come as no surprise that she’s being pursued. But even if the resolution isn’t unexpected, the central relationship remains uplifting. 

A thematically similar tale that’s perhaps even more compelling is The Cold That Brings You Home by E.M. Linden. It stars a girl with an uncanny resistance to cold, working in a house of midwives that not only helps bring children into the world, but also protects them from being snatched by the magical Kind Ones. Or rather, protects the children of married mothers. But when the lead’s unwed friend gives birth, it sends her looking into details that she’d once studiously avoided, all in an effort to save the child. Again, experienced genre readers will predict the ending, but the journey remains well worth your while. 

Kaleidotrope

Three stories caught my attention from the Fall 2026 issue of Kaleidotrope, starting with The Sea Calls by Jennifer Skogen. It tells of the event referenced in the title, where all the town’s teens are compelled to the sea, with one set to be plucked out and sent somewhere entirely other. The lead desperately wishes to be this one, lending the story a wistful and melancholy tone that only increases in power as the narrative progresses. The plot doesn’t go much farther than is described in that basic premise, but the lead’s emotional journey is truly dynamic and makes for a strong selling point. 

A Brief History of the Doorway Program by Damian Stockli tells of the human discovery of an alien portal, setting off a rash of imperialistic wars that the opening paragraphs signal will only end in disaster for humanity. And while I often enjoy alien stories, this one is rooted a bit too thoroughly in early 21st century political satire to really click for me. 

Finally, Something in the Air by Chris Barnham offers a different take on humanity discovering an alien artifact. This one may play fairly close to genre expectations, but it’s written well enough to be entertaining, even if it isn’t incredibly surprising. 

Uncanny

Like the Fall Kaleidotrope, Uncanny issue 72 also features three stories that immediately caught my attention. We’ve seen a lot of AI stories lately, but I was intrigued to see how Ken Liu would handle the topic in A Sigilary for the Median Human in the Gearwrack. Despite a format that divides the story into sections headed by messily-scrawled symbols, it comes across as lecture more often than narrative. It does deliver some emotional catharsis at the end, and I certainly find myself agreeing with many of the points of the lecture, but as a story, it’s a hair thin. 

The Dragonfly by Luna Hou tells of a character struggling to cope with the loss of her best friend, interspersing memories of their time together with her newest obsession: a dragonfly that behaves more like a familiar than an insect. This is a story that’s all about the vibes over the plot, and the descent into obsessive distractions fits the theme quite well, though it leaves me wanting a bit more from the resolution. 

My favorite from the Uncanny trio is Home/Body by P.H. Low, in which a lead who recalls next-to-nothing of their life finds the opportunity to remake themself from the ground up. While that summary may make it sound didactic, the tone of the story is not so at all, with the memory loss, the second-person narration, and the strangeness of the house in which so many people seek to build themselves afresh coming together to lend a surreal air that makes the tale so much more engrossing than the quick summary would suggest. 

October Favorites 

• The Sea Calls by Jennifer Skogen (short story, Kaleidotrope)