Editorial
Editorial: February 2025
Be sure to check out the editorial for a rundown of this month’s great stories.
Be sure to check out the editorial for a rundown of this month’s great stories.
This is one of my “creature stories,” so the gastor came first. I just kept wondering what an animal would look like if it had evolved to live in space. I honestly just had fun coming up with new physiological adaptations, and I even consulted my sister, who studies atmospheric science, for some help.
This month Chris Kluwe presents you a book about love, loss, freaky fantasy, found family, and a little girl named Artemis Darth Vader. That’s right: we’re reading TJ Klune’s The Bones Beneath My Skin, and it is one rollercoaster of a ride.
There are many kinds of witches, some old, some young, some beautiful, others “grotesque” but what all of them share is that they don’t give a single fuck about your opinion and don’t waste time wondering if they should. And isn’t that magnetic? A person who is so self-possessed that it becomes a kind of magic?
Melissa A Watkins thinks you need a new found-family heist novel. She recommends: Hammajang Luck by Makano Yamamoto.
I think we—humans collectively, I mean—have just about understood that we have a responsibility towards the Earth. I also think there’s a subset of people who believe the problem could be solved if we just shifted our exploitation of our environment outwards—to the moon, to Mars, to the asteroid belt. They’re wrong.
Arley Sorg has found another terrific anthology for you to check out: Bestiary of Blood: Modern Fables and Dark Tales, edited by Jamal Hodge. Read all about it in his newest review.
Fungi are wonderful. There’s something so unsettling and yet beautiful about them. There’s an allure in the spores, the feeding off dead matter, the variety of forms. In a past life, before I became a writer, I was a biologist. I loved the breadth and scope of life on this planet. I think fungi have an appeal to people because they’re so alien to our human experience.
Check out a discussion about this month’s content from our editor!
This story was vaguely fictional when I wrote it in February 2023, but reality quickly lapped me. I’m a literature professor and I am watching universities force professors to use AI to create course materials (usually because “it’s cheaper”). The potential for fascist censorship is horrifying.