Published at the back end of 2024, with stories from 2022. I started reading this December 2025 and will pop in the story reviews as I read them in the time honoured tradition (I think 25+ years counts as ‘time-honoured’).
Naomi Kritzer. The Dragon Project.
Originally in Clarkesworld Magazine #186 March 2022. and still online
A neat little story by means of an appetizer to the volume. The protagonist is part of a small company who started 3D-printing organs for transplant, but found the demand for that not particularly great, and so started 3D printing live bioengineered animals. And as you might expect, the story revolves around creating a dragon. It’s an interesting premise, and Kritzer really creates a believable protagonist, and the relationship with the awkward client is handled well and wryly. However, for my money, the story doesn’t quite make the most of the premise. Creating the dragon(s) isn’t an issue, there’s a wee bit of drama when one escaped dragon has to be found (you wouldn’t want a fire breathing dragon loose in the tinder box woods around San Francisco would you?) As I say, OK as far as it goes, but I’m thinking, it’s a Year’s Best SF volume and, hey it’s 30+ years since Pat Murphy’s ‘Rachel in Love’, a stone-cold classic featuring a chimp (obvs not 3D fabbed), and this isn’t up there with that story. [10th Dec 2025]
Grace Chan. Nobody Ever Goes Home to Zhenzhu.
Originally in Lightspeed Magazine #144 May 2022. and still online
A darker turn for the volume. A short vignette of a story, whereby the protagonist follows her ship’s engineer down to the titular planet. He’s gone home for a reason, which she finds out having tracked him through a cyberpunky/Blade Runner type setting, alongside some backstory. Those who have come to the planet to transform it have been ruthless in many ways, some of which have been quite devastating to her engineer’s relatives. There’s a quick shootout and the history that has been hidden will be revealed. It feels a little like an extract from a novel, just a little too quickly in and out of the story to be completely satisfactory, but still impressive for a newish writer. Chan’s story in last year’s volume ‘He Leaps for the Stars, He Leaps for the Stars’ also impressed.[10th Dec 2025]
S.L. Huang. The Ship Cat of the Suzaku Maru.
Originally published in ‘Bridge to Elsewhere’
A lighter story. Two ne’e’r do well stowaways on a spaceship find out their cunning plan comes to naught thanks to the ship’s cat. A normal fur and claws cat mind you. The story is sorta through the cat’s perspective, although the reader gets a full understanding of what’s happening and what is being said. Nice enough, but it did feel somewhat retro, even down to the one fat and one skinny bad guy, and it wouldn’t take much work to retool the story into one that would fit into a 1950s Year’s Best collection (trust me, I’ve read enough of those!) [10th Dec 2025]
Ai Jiang. Give Me English.
Originally in Shortwave Magazine, November 8, 2023 and still online
Still online, and less than 5,000 words so give it a read. I found it the story OK as far as it went. The premise, individuals finding it financially necessary to sell some of their vocabulary, is a tweak on stories about having to sell their memories for money, which I’ve read in the past. I could accept a premise of selling memories, due to their inherent unique nature, but the idea of having a business model of taking and implanting individual words didn’t quite ring true for me. The story, not that there was much of it, was fine enough, but it felt like a small press story, rather than one of the best couple of dozen SF short stories of the year. There’s a huge amount to written in mainstream fiction of the experiences and sacrifices made by immigrants, and in SF you can multiply that due to having different species and planets etc., so this just feels like an opportunity not quite taken. [11th Dec 2025]
Isabel J. Kim. Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist.
Originally in Clarkesworld Magazine, July 2022 and still online
Well, it’s been some four months since I last read any SF! However, I have been kept busy with a bit of model making of an sfnal nature, which started with a xmas present which I suggested to the wife, a model of the ‘Natural Selection’ spaceship from the ‘Three Body Problem’ novels/TV serieses. Truth be told I got on much better with the model than I did with either the novel or the TV series, both of which I baled out on. 
I did take up model making as a means of stopping doom-scrolling on the interwebs, you know, the orange faced tiny handed paedo who half the US population voted in as Leader of the Free World….
And, somewhat more astoundingly it must be some 40 years since I read William Gibson’s ‘Burning Chrome’, which I realise puts it closer to the SF of the 1950s than of the 2020s. Cheeses. Which I mention on account of this story being very much in the Gibson/Sterling/Cadigan cyberpunk mould. It’s online, so follow the link above. The narrative skips along nicely, the neon-lit rainy night-time very redolent of Blade Runner, with the protagonist ‘Cool and Sexy Asian Girl’ quite memorable. [10th April 2026]
A.T. Greenblatt. “If We Make It Through This Alive”
Originally in Slate Magazine, January 2022 and still online
I’ve read a couple of Greenblatt’s stories in recent Year’s Best volumes, and this is is equally good. (Go on, follow the link above and read it). The story is set in a nearish future US of A, post-something or other. The something isn’t really detailed (climate probably) but it’s so bad the Americans are using trains not cars, and the roads are potholed ruins (yup, things are *that* bad). Most people live in cities with train stations, and just a few eke out a difficult living in the rural areas. The story focusses on three women who are first-time entrants in The Great American Road Race (think Death Race 2000?Mad Max but without the violence), with a cobbled together solar powered vehicle. There are risks in the race, but also rewards, and the crux of the story, which is in three sections each focusssing on one of the women, is why each of them is taking part in the race. All are deeply human reasons, as we find out from their back story as the race progresses. A great story. [21st April 2026]
Marie Vibbert. We Built This City.
Originally in Clarkesworld Magazine #189 June 2022 – and still online
Fortunately they didn’t build the city on rock and roll, because that would be like, stupid. Instead, they built it in the upper atmosphere of Venus. Julia’s mother is one of the Founding Mothers, so to speak, but the daughter has disappointed the mother by taking a manual job – cleaning the outside of their floating habitat. It’s hard and dangerous work, but Julia likes it. However, when management decides her maintenance crew can have their numbers greatly reduced, things start to get difficult. Very difficult. There is an increasing intolerance of those not at work, including deportation to for less pleasant habitats, and Julia has to decide whether to stand up for the common good, or keep her head down. After deciding on the latter, she realises the former is the way ahead, despite the high risks involved. It’s an interesting setting, and the characterisation is good, but the cynic in me doesn’t quite get the feels for the ending. [22nd April 2026]
M. Bennardo. Forty-Eight Minutes at the Trainview Cafe.
Originally in Asimovs, November/December 2022
I had read a few Bennardo stories and enjoyed them, but this is the first one of of his I’ve read in almost ten years. And it’s a story set in a computer simulation, and I’ve read many of those in the past 40 or more years, and feared that there might not be anything new to say in this milieu. But in fact this feels fresh and with an interesting angle, and corker of an ending. Try to read the story before you press on reading what I have to say, to avoid a spoiler. The protagonist is no long an embodied human, he has been living in simulations for many years it appears. He visits a railway station simulation is singularly unimpressed : there’s clearly lots gone into creating the sim, down to each individual stone on the track bed being a unique entity. But there are no missions, no actions, just a case of sitting on the station waiting to get on the train in 48minutes to exit the simulation. And he’s quite unimpressed. But an encounter with one of the other people in the simulation makes him a little intrigued, and decides to revisit. He is feeling a bit of ennui with his mountain-climbing sim, and as he explores the train station simulation he begins to wonder if the ultra realistic nature of it is in fact putting him back in touch with his humanity. But he, and the reader, are in for a shock in the final sentences. In exploring an in development area of the sim, which could lead to being able to afford to stay in the sim permanently, he does not follow the instructions, and in an ending redolent of Twilight Zone/Tales of the Unexpected, he opens his eyes and sees everything in low-res wireframe, and everybody – matchstick bodies and full eyeballs visible through non existent skin. And realizes with horror that it’s not humanity at all, it might feel like it, but it’s just programming. A great ending to a good story. [22nd April 2026]
Juliana Baggott. The Historiography of Loss.
Originally in Lightspeed Magazine #142 March 2022 – and still online
Baggott has written a *lot* but somehow this is the first story of hers that I’ve ever read. I enjoyed it. An academic decides to pay for the creation of a holographic version of her father,
who abandoned her at six months. The software company employees arrives and sets it up, and a fully 3D walking talking version of her father gradually appears. And she begins a tricky process of getting to know the father she doesn’t remember. It’s tricky as he has a back story, and when he uses the sim to create his old family trailer home in her garden, she finally finds out just what made him the man who he became. Well handled. [24th April 2026]
