It’s a new year, and I’m excited to get started with reviews of both of my regular sci-fi/fantasy magazines, as GigaNotoSaurus returns from hiatus and Clarkesworld keeps chugging along. Let’s take a look.
Clarkesworld
The opening Clarkesworld issue of 2026 features five short stories bookending a pair of novelettes. It opens with The Stars You Can’t See by Looking Directly by Samantha Murray, which spotlights a woman who had struggled for years with infertility before a poorly-understood alien incursion dramatically alters the nature of all future conceptions. As she and her sister-in-law undergo simultaneous pregnancies, they must reckon with carrying very different children who will occupy dramatically different places in the unknown new world. It’s less about trying to change the future and more about learning to live with it, but it’s a great dive into the lead’s individual psychology.
Next up is my favorite in the issue, another small-scale sci-fi short, Down We Go Gently by M.L. Clark, which sees the spaceborn lead accompany his father for the first time on a planetary trading run. It’s not a plot-heavy story, with the biggest narrative arc simply being the lead’s shock at seeing a culture so different than that of his strictly regimented home. But it’s compelling seeing a world through fresh eyes—at least once the local dialect clicks in the reader’s head—and the excursion also serves to highlight the unique struggles of different ways of life, from maintaining an ecosystem on planet to the fragility and resource-scarcity on ship.
The issue’s first novelette, Donor Unknown by Nika Murphy, follows an artificial lead who had been introduced as a secondary character in “A Guide to Matchmaking on Station 9,” published in Clarkesworld back in 2023. This one reads as an intended standalone, though it throws the reader into the middle of generational rivalries that can make it feel like picking up in the middle of the story. This particular tale focuses on the recovery of art whose winding journey was tied inextricably with the horrors of the Holocaust and the upheaval of the decade that followed. It’s not always easy to follow all the details of the main plot, but it’s a strong read for the constituent themes, with big questions about purpose and a few excellent individual passages.
The second novelette, Je Ne Regrette Rien by James Patrick Kelly, is more than twice as long, featuring a long-lived robotics professor journeying to China to draw inspiration from the unusual research being done there. It’s a slow build that’s squarely focused on the points of divergence between the goals and self-perception of the androids working there and those of the humans funding them. That said, it’s not just 16,000 words of Themes—instead, it tries to offer portraits of the androids just as humanizing as that of the lead. Ultimately, it delivers solid thematic and character work, but whether a reader will be interested in diving in for the nearly novella length will come down to just how engaged they are by the storytelling style.
The issue stays in China with Tomorrow’s Beautiful Dream by Ju Chu, translated by Carmen Yiling Yan. It’s a dystopian short story in which people make ends meet by vacating their own minds, allowing their bodies to mechanically grind away in manual labor. It’s not necessarily one that adds anything new to the subgenre, but it’s well-executed, with the lead’s fears about just what is being demanded of his body during his unconsciousness coming through loud and clear.
The Desolate Order of the Head in the Water by A.W. Prihandita offers an eye-catching opening and a vibrant writing style that makes for easy engagement. The AI-takeover plot has been pretty thoroughly mined at this point, but the details are well-chosen for the current moment and remain unsettling through the eyes of the young protagonist.
The final entry in the fiction session, Space Is Deep by Seth Chambers, opens with the lead gazing down in awed puzzlement at his suddenly alien feet, and it stays about that weird throughout, as the lead and his wives try to decide whether to take their one chance to return to Earth or whether to commit to a lifetime of space travel. There’s a bit of interpersonal drama that slowly unravels into a cosmic weirdness, leaving on a note that’s unexplained but marks an undeniable change.
The nonfiction section includes an editorial summing up 2025 in Clarkesworld, plus an article digging into how both our knowledge and our fiction about the asteroid belt has changed over the years. The customary two interviews are with Nicola Griffith, a wonderful prose stylist whose She Is Here collection comes out next month, and with Alistair Reynolds, who I’ve heard so much about but haven’t yet read.
GigaNotoSaurus
GigaNotoSaurus returns with its monthly longish story, this month the novelette The Last God of Talam Dor by M.R. Robinson. It’s told from the perspective of a priestess whose life work is to usher her charges into the type of death that will see them twice returned to human life and the third time ascended to godhood. Only this time, she’s struck by the beauty of the prince, a woman there to die for familial duty despite no great attachment to the gods. It’s easy from the early stages to see how this story will go, so though the telling is perfectly solid, reader experience here will depend on how well they connect to the interpersonal development.