After a heavy month of short fiction reviews, I anticipate May being a bit lighter. But as always, it starts with dives into this month’s issues of Clarkesworld and GigaNotoSaurus. 

Clarkesworld

The table of contents had me more excited for the May 2026 issue than for any Clarkesworld release this year. Two short stories by authors I often love, three novelettes—my favorite length—and a story in translation? Sign me up! Unfortunately, my feelings after reading were much more mixed, but the high points remain some of the highest of the year so far. 

It all starts with The Profitable Sentience of Household Goods by Louis Inglis Hall, exploring themes that will be familiar for readers of Hall’s other work but in a voice that’s a bit different. It’s structured as a series of messages from one smart appliance to another, as a refrigerator tries to instruct a light switch in how to be its best and earn promotion to higher levels of responsibility. There are plenty of clues—starting with the title—indicating to the reader that the narrator doesn’t quite grasp the totality of the situation, but its messages come with an earnestness that invests the reader in its fate, so that when the truth is revealed, there’s a true emotional weight behind it. Cynical AI stories are a dime a dozen in mid-2020s sci-fi, but while this may hit some familiar themes, it stands out for its heart. 

That heart is matched—and perhaps even exceeded—by the next entry, Tia Tashiro’s Archaeological Evidence for the Time Traveler. It stars a single mother whose archaeological research sites are consistently corrupted by anachronistic messages seemingly directed at her. With an ex at the forefront of time travel research, the possibility that those messages are not mere vandalism but genuine artifacts from the past does not seem so far-fetched. What follows is a non-linear exploration both of the ways the relationship died and her attempts to balance career and family moving forward. It’s a poignant interpersonal story that doesn’t shy away from the lead’s own faults, and it’s only made better by the way it ties into the speculative premise. 

Conquerors by Nick Wolven considers a futuristic society divided between an Earthbound cohort painstakingly working to restore balance to fragile ecosystems and a band of stereotypical adventurers traversing outer space to win new worlds for humanity. Perspective is divided between a mother/daughter pair, with the latter bristling at an upcoming reunion with the oafish Spacers. As one may expect in this sort of story, the major plot arc is the younger lead’s journey toward recontextualizing her view of the divided society—a perspective shift that feels a tad cynical about the character of the spacers but nevertheless remains narratively satisfying. 

Next up, the issue shifts to a trio of novelettes, which regrettably left me underwhelmed after such a strong start to the issue. The first is Paper Airplane Poet by Sherri Singerling, set in a city of extreme social stratification, beset by a plague of non-Euclidean destruction that gives a mathematical veneer to a world that would otherwise read as fantasy. It centers a poor young woman who has just lost both her parents, seeking rescue from a life where her beauty does more harm than good. There’s an interesting interpersonal dynamic with a priest harboring selfish motivations—motivations that the lead sees through easily—but I struggled to share the lead’s enthusiasm for a career change that provides the capstone to the interpersonal arc. 

Aly by Grace Chan could almost feel like a queer, cozy romance if not for the ubiquitous AI assistant implanted in Australians at birth. The lead falls quickly for a Taiwanese man in the country working on an international expansion of his family’s high-end sweets shop. But the pressures of capitalism and the constant presence of the lead’s AI create relational stresses not easily solved. As I mentioned earlier, cynical AI stories are very common these days, and this one isn’t bad and is probably my favorite of the three novelettes in this month’s issue. That said, it also doesn’t hit the level that hooks me into the sort of story I’ve seen so often lately. 

Decimation Circles by Raheem Alvi also includes an AI assistant and a corporate hellscape, with the main conflict being the lead’s attempts to escape debts that live past her natural death and only seem to pile higher upon every resurrection. The exploitative contract is very much the focal point, and while there is a plot–featuring both piecing together of memories from past lives and efforts to get off the grid–I mentally group this with the worldbuilding-heavy “here’s a terrible way the world could be” sort of tale. The sci-fi fandom writ large seems to consistently like this sort of tale much more than I do, so while it’s no real surprise to see me struggle through this one, that doesn’t mean it won’t work for the right audience. 

The issue closes with The Scent of Memory by Zhao Haihong, translated by S. Qiouyi Lu. Unfortunately, it’s the fourth straight story that I’m much less predisposed to like than the average genre fan. In this case, it’s because of a plot driven by the lead crossing oceans and continents to make a last-ditch effort to win back an ex before she marries someone else. It’s hard to get my sympathy for an attempt to break up a relationship that is healthy (as far as the characters know), and that main plot sours me on an otherwise intriguing sci-fi premise, featuring a technology that uses scent to trigger repressed memory. Like everything published in Clarkesworld, there’s enough technical proficiency that I can easily see this working for other readers, but like much of the back half of this issue, it isn’t for me. 

Fortunately, the nonfiction section returns the issue to the starry heights of the first two stories. The fascinating science article digs into three ocean creatures with different strategies to achieve immortality—or something in the neighborhood—and discusses whether any of those techniques could be applied to anti-aging research in humans. The issue then transitions to a pair of interviews with authors I’ve quite enjoyed in the past: Ray Nayler and Martha Wells. The former managed the difficult task of getting me even more excited for Palaces of the Crow, which I have since started and am enjoying immensely, while the latter delves both into the transition of Murderbot from print to screen and Wells’ recent fantasy work. It closes with an upbeat editorial rounding up this year’s award shortlists featuring Clarkesworld works. 

GigaNotoSaurus 

This month’s longish short story in GigaNotoSaurus is Year of the Tangram by Ichabod Cassius Kilroy. It reads a bit like magical realism, featuring an autistic child who becomes obsessed with a once-despised puzzle upon the realization that the toy is alive. It’s not a story with a driving central plot, but it’s worth reading for the way it brings to life a lead struggling with social expectations, school bullies, and parents who—while often well-meaning—just can’t quite understand. 

May Favorites 

• The Profitable Sentience of Household Goods by Louis Inglis Hall (short story, Clarkesworld)
• Archaeological Evidence for the Time Traveler by Tia Tashiro (short story, Clarkesworld)