Review of Nicole Lynn, “Entropy in a Fruit Bowl,” Flash Fiction Online 140 (May 2025): 11-14 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: Death of a parent, physical violence.
Apparently the trick to learning necromancy is: Start small. But love that only existed asymmetrically can never be resurrected once it is dead — these are the two lessons of this short, exceedingly sad, story.
(First published in The Arcanist October 2022.)
Review of Rebecca Washburn, “A Flame At the Edge of Darkness,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 361-383 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
The story frames itself as being about the Darkness — a phenomenon that isn’t quite natural, isn’t quite artificial — and the Flames — the young girls who are the only predators of the Darkness; but in truth it’s much more a story of love and estrangement between mother and daughter. I had some sympathy with Maggie, the mother (from whose point of view the story is told), up until her thinly veiled homophobia was revealed, as well as the way she pretended her religion was “love”, and then I lost all sympathy for her. I spent the rest of the story desperately hoping that she wouldn’t get resolution, that there wouldn’t be redemption, wouldn’t be a happy ending, because that seemed like it would just be too easy. Having reached the ending, I’m not quite sure if I’m happy with it or not.
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 Mae Juniper Stokes, “A Collections Librarian of the Slow-Flying Nautilus,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 91-110 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: Book burning (not in the censorship sense, but in the literal sense. Still hurts to read about).
I regularly see my philosophical friends and colleagues asking for recommendations for SFF stories relevant to various topics that they can suggest to their students; I think there’s a good chance at some point in the future I will recommend Stokes’ story for the way it engages with the ethical implications at the intersection of resource management and cultural heritage (with a side dose of immigration and colonisation). This isn’t a topic often explored in story form, and I found this an interesting take!
Review of Phoenix Mendoza, “Peace,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 197-201 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content warning: War.
The narrator (who’s name we never learn) and her partner, Lorna, are trapped in a war that seems unwinnable, fighting ever since the aliens arrived, three years ago. Despite this, Lorna still believes in peace, and tells the narrator that one day, she will too.
Reading such a story in the present climate, where there is so much war but the participants involved are ourselves and not aliens, was a strange experience. There’s something that feels almost safe about imagining battling against aliens: They are alien, after all, it’s okay for us to read about fighting them, killing them, murdering them. But the very fact that this feels okay, just because they are aliens, is a deeply uncomfortable feeling, because that’s exactly the same excuse people use for making war against other people.
Review of Reyzl Grace, “Zvezdochka,” Luna Station Quarterly 61 (2025): 283-306 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This was a sweet little reflective love story steeped in folklore and theology.
Review of Corey Jae White, “Exopunk’s Not Dead,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 20-25. — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
Content note: Drug and alcohol abuse.
Wanna read a story about queer guys punching Nazis? Then this is a story for you!
(First published in A Punk Rock Future, 2019).
Review of Holly Lyn Walrath, “Ghosts in the Shell,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 70 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This was the itty-bittiest of little flash fic stories — but Walrath nevertheless manages to pack quite a bit into that one single solid paragraph of text. It’s all introspection and yet it manages to convey a rich breadth of history and scene-setting, capped off with a satisfying ending. I love seeing a well-crafted piece of fiction like this!
Review of Vincent Endwell, “The World Has Been This Way For a Long Time,” Radon Journal 9 (2025): 44-47 — Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
This title intrigued me, as there was a delightful ambiguity in what it is signalling — would this be a happy story or a sad one? It could be either!
And then it turned out to almost be neither, rather instead it was mostly a quiet story, “speculative” in the sense that the narrator spent a lot of time wondering what if, what if, what if. But at the end, there is definitely some solace that we as the reader can take away.
Review of Atalanti Evripidou, “We Are Island,” Luna Station Quarterly 60 (2024): 127-145 — Purchase online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.
I love it when I read a story where one character’s love for another is so palpable, so shining, that you see it from the very first page and you get swooped up in it. This is one of those stories. Elias’s love for Ren is dazzling, and so is Ren’s for Elias.
And yet, as brightly as is shines, it doesn’t eclipse the background world that Evripidou has deftly constructed through the introduction of one simple change: It’s a world very much like ours except that there are chips available which when implanted allow people access to their familial memories. Evripidou works out the consequences of this one idea in ways that enhance her characters. It’s such a deftly-balanced story; I was super impressed. (And I desperately would love to see it turned into an 8- or 12-episode TV series, if one can do that with such a short story!)
SFF Reviews