"Something Cruel" by Gabrielle Emem Harry (Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology, Issue V)

“When she looks up, she feels like she’s falling into the sky, into all that red, swimming in blood and Fire.” Minika, a member of the Usiene, crosses The World Invisible to bring back a punishment who has escaped, only to realize she may have gotten the wrong person. In what is one of the many gorgeous stories featured in Will This Be a Problem? The Anthology, Issue V, a collection of African speculative fiction edited by Olivia Kidula and Somto Ihezue, Harry paints a vibrant tableau of retribution and grace, of the need for joy and forgiveness, and of all the insidious ways people’s personal hells can interlace with one another, without even realizing.

"Lucinda Espinosa’s Twenty-Seventh Death" by M.R. Robinson (Fusion Fragment #24)

Luce, a bounty hunter who doesn’t know how to quit but knows she has to, steps into a bar called Last Stop to settle her tab. Finch, the woman who has killed Luce twenty-six times in twenty-six universes, follows suit. What ensues is a neo-western chase across the multiverse that has already happened and is bound to happen; a sapphic love story that is as inescapable as the storm coming the protagonists’ way. With prose crackling with mirth and sharp as razor wire, Lucinda Espinosa’s Twenty-Seventh Death grabs your heart from the start and doesn’t let go—even when you can see the end.

"Sunflower Loop" by Beth Goder (Translunar Travelers Lounge #12)

Time loop stories are always an interesting experiment on the potency of repetition; on how words can become more like magic spells when you use them again and again—but very often, such stories tend to sacrifice substance for style. Beth Goder’s Sunflower Loop however balances both as effortlessly as biking in space: a meditation on agency and fate, where with every loop the protagonist is losing time and the sunflower becomes more menacing. “Maybe it’s about how if you turn toward something too many times, for too long, you lose yourself.”

"What We Don’t Know About Angels" by Kristina Ten (Lightspeed #177)

I don’t often come across stories that I absolutely cannot categorize even if I tried. Yet What We Don’t Know About Angels is one such story. It starts in the bathroom of a conference center and keeps unraveling with a surreal certainty that at times is reminiscent of Tom Robbins and other times of the glorious havoc that is Everything Everywhere All at Once. You can expect thoughts on climate change, loss, severing parts of yourself to fit in and what happens when those parts grow back, fascinating mythology interludes and musings about the nature of angels, and intriguing nail polish colors swirling around your eyes for long after you’ve finished reading.

© 2025 Danai Christopoulou