Notable Short Fiction: Clarkesworld January/February 2026

There are three stories in this issue (January) I liked and would like to share. They are:

"The Desolate Order of the Head in the Water" by A.W. Prihandita is a creepy little horror story, and the title is fully accurate. This is a near-future story of an all-conquering AI, and is as bleak as you might expect. It's probably not something you want to read if you're depressed. Having said that, why did I like it, you ask? Well, even bleak stories, if written well enough and with compelling characters, can worm inside your head and stay there. This is one of those. 

"The Stars You Can't See By Looking Directly," by Samantha Murray, is an interesting little story that is a cross between science fiction and magical realism. The precipitating event, snow on Christmas Day in Australia at the height of summer, sets off a chain of events that represent a new evolution for the human race, with all babies conceived thereafter apparently genetically modified humans. The story becomes a quiet, thoughtful examination of the past and the future of humanity, and what it will mean for the respective children of the protagonist and her best friend, one of which will be an "old" human and one of which will be new. This story packs quite a punch. 

"Donor Unknown," by Nika Murphy, is a clever, complicated story of an android matchmaker wearing the holographic face of a human, who goes hunting for a painting taken from a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation in 1941. This story deals with prejudice and ghosts of the Holocaust, and generational trauma. It talks at the very end about "loving one's true self," so it has a nice uplifting conclusion. 

The February issue cover art has another instance of the funny little robots that artist Matt Dixon apparently loves--they've made several appearances. This issue has two outstanding stories. 

"Painstaking," by Rich Larson, is a cyberpunk story set in Nigeria dealing with family and identity. The premise is a bit bonkers--the protagonist, Mars, is inhabited by an immortal alien organism that has turned his body into something resembling a starfish, capable of regenerating a twin, called a "clone-brother," Balarabe, after Mars was accidentally cut in half. This is a rather gross idea that get explored in detail in this story, and ends up being quite interesting. 

"Three Fortunes on Alcestis As Told By the Fraud Baeliss Shudal," by Louis Inglis Hall, is the tale of a "false" fortune-teller who nevertheless manages to tell quite a bit of truth. This story has a touch of the horrific as well, as the protagonist reads the mad emperor's fortune in the "shattered entrails of an entire civilization." This is another story that is on the quiet side, but the further you read the more steam it gathers, and the more it pays off at the end. 

I also want to once again plug Clarkesworld Magazine. I've been subscribing to them for years, and even if you get a print subscription through their Patreon (as I do), this high-quality magazine is worth the expense. There's a reason editor Neil Clarke is a four-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Editor. In the meantime, please check out the above stories. 

 

More Stories I Have Read (And You Should Too!)

 

Apparition Lit is a literary speculative fiction magazine that I did not know existed until a little while ago. Out of curiosity, I became one of their patrons to check them out. This is the first issue I received, guest edited by Brendan O'Brien, and I have to say I was rather impressed. The magazine features speculative fiction, poetry and non-fiction articles. 

In particular, the story "The Plague Collector" by Tom Okafor caught my attention. This story has an edge of horror, but it is beautifully written:

In that moment, the sky wears dusk. The garden freezes, unhearing the buzzes of wild insects with which it is swathed. You look into the garden, chills carve crisscrosses into your skin, and your eyes glint with a salient light as they behold Oke Ala standing fifteen meters away from you in the center of the garden. Your fingers clutch the stalk. She is mighty, tall, and thick; her skin is the black of rich loam; her hair is full, darker than the silence of the night, braided at both sides of her head; innumerable golden rings occupy her earlobes, gleaming with hues alien to your eyes; and her lips shine red like a bleeding dream.

It's also done in second person present tense POV, which is not easy to pull off (although I've been seeing that point of view more and more lately). 

"Everything, Nothing At All, and All That's In Between," by Rebecca E. Treasure, is another story hovering at the junction of fantasy and horror. I don't want to spoil it too much, but the further you get into it the more horrific it gets. But for all that, at the end the protagonist manages to break free from her jailers, and help her friends as well:

She gasps, hesitant, not quite believing. The fingertip of her pinky splits, a little black hair poking out. Fear comes into her eyes and I’m sorry for that, but now they won’t want her--she’s free to want for herself. Up and down the rows, we who would run are freeing the rest.

“You cursed me,” she whispers, but her hand comes up to meet mine.

I nod, helping her from her holes. “Pass it on,” I say.

We are unrooted, cursed, the ruination of their plans. We need only ourselves.

"Bringing Down the Neighborhood," by Bernard McGhee, is more of an SF horror story, about a son returning to his childhood home to see a father who has fallen under the sway of a alien plant, woven with the background of a gentrified neighborhood where the people who have been there for years can't afford it any longer: 

“You haven’t been around much these last 15 years, so you don’t know what it’s been like,” James said. “They all say they want to make the neighborhood better. But they never seem to notice all the people they’re pushing out while they do it. Calling us a ‘blighted neighborhood’ as if that’s something that just happens and now we’re all a disease. Like the people who lived here chose to have the funding cut to the school and the police station; chose to have BunleeCorp close down the warehouse and move all those jobs to Wyoming. But it’s ok. It’s ok.” He pointed to the gray pyramid. “Our friend here came all the way from the Helix Nebula to help us turn it all around. Watch now. You’ll like this part.”

"This part" being at the end of the story, the neighborhood is "de-gentrified," all the other houses old and broken-down (a bit of delicious reversal of fortune, that) and the protagonist's house suddenly new and restored along with the protagonist now having enough money to help all the old neighbors rebuild. 

The final story in the issue, "The City and the Styrofoam Sea," by Mar Vincent, is a post-apocalyptic tale of a rather creepy future Earth:

The city had started it all.

She was hardly old enough to recall the world a different way. Blue sky had been commonplace then,

rather than the rarity it was now. If there weren’t others in the Bunker old enough to confirm this memory, she’d almost believe it a fancy of her own imagination. 

A time before black plumes spewed relentlessly into the sky, and with them the metastatic material—no longer organic or synthetic but a messy mix of the two—which infected the landscape in all directions, devouring what existed, natural and man-made, and repurposing everything into new and illogical growths. Fungal lampposts. Fields of waving copper-wire weeds. Once-suburban neighborhoods gnawed down to slumping cave mouths in a shingle-shale wasteland.

This story definitely has a Last of Us vibe to it, if a slightly happier ending. 

There's also four poems in this issue. I usually find SF poetry to be very hit-and-miss, but these poems weren't too bad. Finally, there is a non-fiction article, "Let There Be Blight," by A.J. Van Belle. In keeping with the issue's theme, this article talks about fungi--in particular "terrestrial decomposer fungi"--and makes what seems like a yucky topic pretty interesting. 

This is a pretty interesting little magazine, as well. You can subscribe here , join their Patreon, or buy the issue at Smashwords. (Just to be clear, nobody from the magazine contacted me and asked or paid me to sing their praises. I just enjoyed their magazine and think they deserve to be more widely known.)

Stories I Have Read (And You Should Too!)

 Now that we're in a new year and things have settled down a bit in my life (if not the wider world, lolsob), I thought I would start a new series consisting of just what the title says: Stories I have enjoyed that deserve a wider audience. I subscribe and/or am a patron to several genre SFF magazines, and also find links to other stories in my internet travels, so I thought I would lump several of them together every so often and recommend to my readers (*waves*). 

With that in mind, let's look at the January/February issue of Uncanny Magazine.

There are three stories in this issue I really enjoyed. The first, "Do Houses Dream of Scraping the Sky?" by Jana Bianchi, deals with a subject I have had to wrestle with of late in my own life: grief. The protagonist is cleaning out her grandmother's house after her grandmother's death, and both she and the house are struggling:

I put the plastic bags on the sideboard before opening my arms and resting my face against her feverish wall, and House blew her nose by flushing the toilet of the hallway bathroom.

“Hush, now. I’m here. I’m so sorry,” I remember saying, caressing her. The tap started dripping faster, and I strove to keep my own tears at bay. “Yeah, I know, I know. I’ll miss her too.”

As the protagonist goes through the minutiae of her grandmother's life, discarding and sorting and fighting with House over what to keep and what to give away, both of them slowly work through the stages of grief and come to an acceptance, and a remembrance of love for the person who has left them. 

At the end of the story, House--who is a well-drawn and layered character--seems to vanish. But the protagonist picks up one of her grandmother's plants to take with her:

“Goodbye, House,” I said, and closed my eyes. “I love you.”

That night, when I arrived here, I put the snake plant vase in the balcony. I took a shower, I ate something, I played some video game. Then I decided I’d go to bed earlier, and as I soon as I got my head in the pillow—

Precisely. I hear the noise in the balcony, and when I arrived there the snake plant was somehow planted amongst my herbs. When I came back to this very same room, I felt my bed hugging me back for the very first time. 

This is a gentle little story of love, loss, and recovery. It hit home for me due to my own life circumstances, but I know others will appreciate it also. 

"A Recipe for Hope and Honeycake," by Jordan Taylor, takes a different emotional tack: this is the story of Bramblewilde, an outcast fairy who has adopted a human village and is trying their best to fit in with the people around them. But the villagers are uneasy around her, and she is not really trusted:

The villagers heard Bramblewilde’s cart before they saw it. Bramblewilde’s husky voice and the chiming of the cart’s fairy bells wove between the market stalls, which were set up in one of Squire Rothchild’s empty fields. The scent of lavender, likewise, drifted in on the cool spring breeze, twining among the scents of freshly baked bread, livestock and beer, cured meat. 

The villagers turned their heads at Bramblewilde’s approach, and Bramblewilde’s voice dimmed under their stares.

As a harsh winter sets in, and various catastrophes including a fever overtake the village, Bramblewilde struggles with how to help them, since she knows the people would likely not extend their hand in return:

They regretted offering no help to their neighbor with a sickly cow.

They regretted not feeding the children at the gate from their meagre stores.

And yet, had the shoe been on the other foot, what would the villagers have done? No one, they thought, would have helped Bramblewilde.

Surely the villagers deserved whatever hardships they got.

Or did they?

So Bramblewilde consults the sentient bees of her hive (this story, like the last, has great non-human characters) and receives an answer. They whip up the titular honeycake, infused with the magical hope of Faerieland, and start taking slices of it to the villagers. At the end, they visit the nearby Wood, on the border of their outcast Faerie, and discover the god Pan, who gets the last slice of their cake. 

“But look!” Bramblewilde gazed up at the sky. “The sun is shining. And I have brought you something, my lord.” They folded back the green cloth covering the last slice of honeycake. “Perhaps you would like to try a bite?”

“What is it, little one?” Pan asked.

“Hope,” said Bramblewilde.

This is a story of pulling together in the face of adversity and helping one another. I'm sure it was written as a post-pandemic story, as so many are nowadays. It's definitely a comfort read. 

"A Contract of Ink and Skin," by Angela Liu, is the polar opposite of these: it's a short, eerie horror story of death, tattoos, and ghosts, and packs quite a punch. It's also told in second person present tense, which is usually a dicey POV, but this one works:

The earliest versions included uglier things: ground up insect eggs and corroded bronze, but the ink you receive is pure, made only from blood of the Cursed.

They inject it into your eyes first because that’s the easiest way to tell you’re different. The black ink mixed with blue and red, a purplish nebula pooling into the whites of your eyes.

It takes three months for your body to fully heal, but you’ll be able to see the dark patterns within just a few days. The ink aches in their presence, sweating through the pores in your skin, but that ink is your shield, your bridge, your right to a Contract.

As the protagonist is injected more and more with the magical ink, the blood of the Cursed, she begins to separate from the people around her, and see and experience more magical things. The imagery in this story is fantastic and haunting:

The warm threads of ink envelope your throat, tracing the soft line of your shoulders and hips. The black globes of your eyes see them before you feel them. A hurricane of dark light. A taste like cinnamon and electricity fills your mouth. 

No one tells you that the longest night is the night when you are finally offered your Contract.

It’s been three months, and your body has healed, but it no longer belongs to you. The Inked are here to serve, and you will, just like all those before you. This is the Contract of your ancestors, the way they chose to survive the hunger, the love of the Cursed. The cost of peace paid by the ink on the skin.

This story is just under 1500 words, but wow. It's worth the price of admission all by itself. 

Finally, from the Sunday Morning Transport, comes "Rude Litterbox Space," by Mary Robinette Kowal, an SF tale of an intelligent physics-teaching cat who talks via a communications mat. Elsie is aboard a ship approaching an FTL jump gate when she realizes things are going wrong:

Elsie pushed off from the window and went to her communication board, which was laid out on the floor. It was a flexible mat with touch sensors mapped to different words and phrases. Yucky. How could she explain to her valet that the approach to the jumpsite was all wrong? She toggled the board to her science words and phrases, hoping the predictive text could follow this higher level of thought. She pressed: Velocity. Angle. No. Gravity. Strain. Ship. Litterbox.

We follow Elsie's attempts to save the ship and her battles with a ship's captain who views her just as an upstart pet:

“For crying out loud . . . You’re one of them.” The captain’s voice dripped with condescension. “There’s nothing an animal can do better than a person.”

“With all due respect, sir.” Her valet’s voice was chilly with the script she’d had to deploy multiple times. “The Confederation of United Planets recognizes that personhood is not limited to humans. Elsie is a person.”

“It’s a cat.”

But the bridge crew recognizes that Elsie just saved their lives, and bring her tidbits at the end. 

This sounds pretty fantastical, to be sure, but it's based on the real-life exploits of the author's communication-mat-using cat. At Kowal's Instagram, there are regular video snippets of Elsie talking by pressing buttons on her mat. Apparently she has a vocabulary of around 120 words. 

So that's it for this installment. Others will be forthcoming, as I read stories I think should be shared. Thanks!