A Vintage Kind of Death
Alex T. Singer,  Clarkesworld #241

“It was August 5, she was twenty-four years and three hours old, and this would be the last day of her life.

She intended to savor it.”

In a museum city preserving an interactive history of ancient humanity, disused anti-air artillery unit Cannon-D dons a 3D printed body, downloads a personality pack, and takes up the role of Kanna Khan—an old-world human who’s about to die.

Cannon-D-as-Kanna hits it off with a fellow automatic playing Kanna’s emotionally unavailable boyfriend as they meet for a foredoomed “date” that’s as romantically devastating as it is narratively tense. But for two machines LARPing the lives of the dead, humanity proves to be a hell of a distraction, leaving them both struggling to stick to their automated script. As both historical reenactors and daytripping voyeurs, they’re simply too captivated—by the perplexities of human existence, by each other, by the novel thrill of being alive.

It’s charming. It’s funny. It’s as hopeful as it is bleak! Singer draws deliciously cruel parallels between Kanna and Cannon-D as she explores the loneliness of purpose and an inescapable desperation for connection in this emotional short-circuit of a tragicomedy.

Dragon Pearl
Emily Y. Teng,  Uncanny Magazine #72

“It never ceases to amaze me, the things we grow accustomed to.”

What are we willing to fight for? What would we give up to protect it? When a teen war refugee begins her transformation into a Dragon—a biomechanical combat unit dedicated to propelling the Manifest Destiny of the Phoenix Empire—she accepts that to become a zodiarchon pilot, one does not simply strap in and eject out at will. This isn’t a freelance mercenary gig. Here, battle mechs are forever.

Through brutal surgical enhancements and debilitating augmentations, the heroine forfeits body, identity, and freedom to become the ideal weapon. Her family’s future depends on her loyalty to the empire. If that loyalty ever falters, their safety is at risk. And should she succeed, her only personal reward is to become myth. To be forgotten. She’s a Dragon now. She’ll outlive them all.

The war of the thing is purely montage—Teng is more far-thinking than that. When an empire has no more worlds to conquer, who’s left to weep? Where Singer’s Cannon-D uses peacetime to freebase the human experience, Teng’s protagonist has already irrevocably sacrificed any chance at return to her old life. A riveting tragedy of dehumanization in the pursuit of imperial expansion, one of the greatest strengths of “Dragon Pearl” is that it doesn’t try to find a tidy solution to the ouroboros of progress—it leaves you to sit with it.

Boys of the Fellwood
David R. Hoffman,  Apex Magazine #154

In a village where boys sprout full-body plate armor from their skin, the late-blooming protagonist prepares to enter the Fellwood, kill a ghoul, and prove he’s finally a man. But a pre-ghoul-slaying tryst with his lady love, Vale, suggests that not even an unscrewable codpiece can provide the kind of closeness that either of them is really aching for.

While the protagonist finds his solution in the delightful rip-and-tear of body horror, Hoffman’s extended metaphor of armor as masculine emotional repression proves neither simple nor painless to shed. In the Fellwood, vulnerability is a deliberate, agonizing—even alienating—choice.

And if that’s just too much to bear, well—“the faceplate flips down.”

The Once-girl Made of Mycellium
Shingai Njeri Kagunda,  Apex Magazine #154

You’ll think you’ve heard this one before. There’s a woman, a garden, a directive: don’t eat the fruit (and, of course, she does—she always eats the fruit). But in this story, original sin is cultivated in ones and zeroes, a code that all girls are programmed with, passed from mother to daughter and similarly enforced. To break from it is to be considered broken.

Using the choral-voiced collective “we” as narrator, Kagunda expertly guides the reader through the frustrations of girlhood, the clumsiness of queerness, and the struggle for self-expression—all the way back to the garden, where we can all find new ways to exist, connect, and grow.

A Sigilary for the Median Human in the Gearwrack
Ken Liu,  Uncanny Magazine #72

“What does ‘taking a stand’ mean, you wonder. How does one take a stand against machines?

Machines have no will, no agency. Machines stand for nothing, and you can’t stand against something with no standing.”

Welcome to the forever war of the large language model age, in which the simple act of creation now fosters a sense of multi-dimensional anxiety-dread. But not if you’re Ken Liu! Ken Liu is out there having more fun with language than damn near anyone.

Structured around a series of sigils—Solidarity, Slop, Clumsy New Speech, and more—Liu’s protagonist journeys through a world where machines devour and regurgitate the very things that make us human. Sound familiar?

Part magician’s grimoire, part anarchist cookbook, through wax seals, kennings, malicious non-compliance, and good old-fashioned doing-the-work, Liu harkens to Tarana Burke’s “Joy is an act of resistance” as he pushes back against grim doomsaying with solutions that range from playfully inventive to triumphantly fuck you. A brief detour through the history of Lorem ipsum proves that these problems aren’t even all that new—just different, more insidious. A must-read for any writer who’s wrasslin’ with the creative despair of the slop era. This is one to come back to.

The Raspberry Manifesto of Professor Warana
Adam-Troy Castro,  Lightspeed Magazine #197

“I contain multitudes. Also Vitamin C.”

The entity known as Dejuik is many things: a renowned anti-artist; a masterful sculptor; a five-in-one creative collective; and, most recently, an orange. Not exactly by choice. Still, Dejuik—who remains capable of speech in spite of the whole citrus situation—claims to be perfectly content in this new state of being. In fact, Dejuik has transcended contentment. Dejuik is orgasmic.

The story, too, contains multitudes: biographical profiles, transhumanist worldbuilding, a Platonic dialogue between orangified Dejuik and the titular Professor Warana, who has willfully transformed his own head into a salamander (it’s an entire thing). Castro peels back the rind of meaning, art, being, and the nature of happiness with wry, philosophical whimsy.

Also, there’s a dog in it.

Boxed In
Stuart Docherty,  Kaleidotrope Autumn 2026

“I don’t give up on things. I like to hold on, get things moving again, you know? Never give up, never back down, that’s my motto.”

They aren’t exactly men with big-time dreams. Artleby yearns for a riding lawnmower or a backyard pool. Bartelby—arguably the brains of the duo—has even simpler desires: he likes his life exactly the way it is, and he’d like for it to stay that way, thank you very much.

Docherty nails the immobility of working-class life through blue-collar absurdism and a banger of a twist ending. When these two goofs wrangle their bumbling blokishness to summon a wish-fulfilling demon—notably, without reading the fine print—the Monkey’s Paw of it all might leave you braced for an apocalyptically worst case scenario.

Except that, y’know, Bartleby and Artleby . . .

An American Execution
Kay Vaindal,  Seize the Press #14

“Whatever is a defense mechanism, I know.”

In a world of endless doomscrolling, cheap online shopping, and increasingly mundanified cruelty, it’s also just, like, whatever. A creed. A shrug! A way of life.

Joined by twelve-year-old Claudia (whose Salvadoran mother has been abducted by ICE) and boyfriend-of-convenience Braden (who claims to be an alien emissary from an intergalactic council performing a survey of human empathy), the protagonist attends the resurrection of a 9/11 hijacker and witnesses the spectacle of a belated public execution, which—apropos of recent real-life events, begs the question—is Vaindal a crack futurist? A modern prophet? Or is some goon in the Trump Administration scouring her work and taking notes?

Irreverent and casually unsettling, Vaindal weaponizes apathy with an arsenal of digressive comedy, observational humor, and pop culture references—all while injecting the existential unease of life in a civilization roiled to bloodlust. Is our brutality intrinsic? Inherited? Whatever? The desperation for proof of human compassion is all there in Braden’s notes:

“Kind young human helped disabled human put luggage in overhead bin. Wasn’t even her job, to help. Is that something? That’s something, right? Please, your lordships, that’s something.”

Drawers
Kelly Luce,  Split Lip October 2026

“Eventually there will be nowhere left that isn’t full of the pieces of something else.”

When a woman buys a dresser on Facebook Marketplace, she discovers it’s filled with an inheritance of old clothing that carries fragments of other people’s lives. Boundaries of identity blur and unravel as she finds herself inexplicably imparted with skills, memories, experiences, and connections that don’t belong to her (or do they?).

Through matter-of-fact fabulism and bite-sized narrative detail, Luce imprints the strange intimacy of the secondhand: the osmosis of existence, the absurdity of connection, the melancholy jostle of an old drawer, jimmied open, full of the debris of other lives.

Jimmy. Fucking. Bang.
Myna Chang,   Small Wonders #40

“…and we all shiver for Jimmy’s fuck-me purr, wanna go again?

And we do, we do wanna go again…”

Rowdy with a breathless, slang-slinging swagger, Chang turns back the ticker on middle age for one last blowout in a beer-soaked, neon-lit bacchanal of nostalgia. This fleeting regression to the teenage rhythms of rock ‘n’ roll revels in its own excess: horny, sweaty, a little embarrassing, and doesn’t give a fuuuuck. It’s a kickback shotgun of kinetic imagery—all harbingered by the return of the man, the myth, the party himself: Jimmy Bang.

Beneath all the randy bravado, there’s a bittersweet baseline to Jimmy’s “streetlight magic”: a contemptuous, hangover ache for a misspent youth.

© 2026 Jessica Luke García