Review of B. Zelkovich, “The Secret Ingredient,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 154-165 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
If you love either “queers unable to recognize flirting when it stares them in the face” genre stories or stories about love over coffee, this is a story for you! Sweet, light, and entirely happy.
Review of Amara Mesnik, “Canary, Canary,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 327-347 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
One could describe the premise of this story as: Colonizing men get their comeuppance — and since it comes at the hands of a young woman, it’s rather satisfying. On the other hand, it could also be described as: Unbearably naive woman gets taught a lesson — and since that young woman is the same one, since Saisha only gets to be the heroine because it was her naivety that caused the problem in the first place, it’s also rather frustrating.
Review of Kelli Dianne Rule, “To Bethany, With Teeth,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 349-359 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This story was one of my favorite kinds of speculative fiction: Ordinary world, ordinary life, except everything has just been shifted sideways slightly, so that everything is wrong, is weird, and as a reader you have know idea how or why or where the next weirdness is going to come it. It’s a story that keeps you on your toes. It’s also a little bit creepy and more than a little bit disturbing.
And I gotta say, I would totally watch the hell out of “DIY Me, Bro”!
Review of Jennifer Jeanne McArdle, “When to Choose the Snake God,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 15-31 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: child slavery.
I found this story intriguing because it rejects a lot of tenets that we might ordinarily take for granted — that a captured child might prefer a life of servitude in the empire than the life in the provinces that they’d left behind; that given a choice to return home, that choice might not be worth making; that sometimes it is better to die for a god than to live for it.
Review of Yukimi Ogawa, “Those Uncaring Waves”, Clarkesworld Issue 222, March (2025): Read Online. Reviewed by Myra Naik.
A hauntingly beautiful novella. So well written, richly layered, and very detailed. This was an absolute treat to read.
A story with an intricately created world usually has that as the highlight of the story. Here, it was the background for another beautiful story. I cannot overstate how lovely this story is – the plot, the emotion, the scale, the world building, the structure – everything so so good.
This novella is a must-read. I can’t even try to put it in a genre or explain “key points”. Read for yourself and see; thank me later!
Review of Aisling Campbell, “The Vessel,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 249-271 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
I enjoyed this — complex characters, interesting setting, enough glimpses into backstory without it feeling like info dump, and an intriguing blend of witches and technology that made the story resist easy genre classification.
Review of Anna O’Brien, “Wind Whisperers,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 233-247 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Noma’s job is to whisper to the wind, the trick it into no longer agitating the skyscrapers and their inhabitants. Her job is not to mentor new wind whisperers, but Bryce, her newly assigned mentee, isn’t going to let that stop him.
Noma may find Bryce intensely irritating, but his earnestness is just sincere enough that I found him highly entertaining. This story made me laugh many times, and made me glad to have read it when I reached the end.
Review of Erin Stubbe, “Intent of Form and Function,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 127-153 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: Unwanted pregnancy, abortion.
As I started reading this story, something in its essence felt very much like it was a modern-day Rumpelstiltskin retelling, which I was enjoying very much — and when this was confirmed, I enjoyed it even more. But at the same time, it’s also so much more than that, it’s a story of redemption.
Review of A.C. Luke, “Roil,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 113-119 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
As a child, Alsea was marked out as special, taught the songs that only few know how to sing in order to calm the ghosts and put them to rest. Now that she’s an adult, she spends her days waiting for ghosts to cross through the wall, to find them and sing to them.
What kept this story from being just another ordinary/run-of-the-mill ghost-exorcism story was the breathless hints of what lies on the other side of that wall — what, and who, and how did they come to be there, and how did they all die.
It was a curious little story.
Review of Caren Gussoff Sumption, “The Climacteric,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 167-172 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This is a story that probably all too many women will identify with — a story of how women are taught to make themselves small, to not ask for too much. For me, it was the sort of story that leaves me feeling worse off after having read it, weighed down by a sad, heavy depression. I did like the cat, though.
SFF Reviews