Current Issue Highlights
We have a lively bunch of stories in our January/February 2026 issue! John Richard Trtek’s novella teems with intrigue, deceit, danger, and the mystery of “The Lady in Camo,” while Alexander Jablokov’s novelette, “Ecobomb,” is a tense yet often amusing tale about the unanticipated consequences of an alien invasion!
William Preston tells a moving story about a dying man, his sister, his robot double, and his best friend in “Stay”; James Sallis’s characters calmly face alien visitors and the death of half of humanity in “And We Will Find Rest”; in his first sale to Asimov’s, R.T. Ester tells a complicated tale about “The Tourist”; also new to Asimov’s, well-known author Adam-Troy Castro’s characters enjoy a final day of freedom in “As long as We’re Still Here, We Might as Well Dance”; some young men experience serious breakdowns in Jack Skillingstead’s “Replacement Theory”; a woman faces an unusual condition in K.A. Teryna’s lovely story about “All My Birds” (this tale was translated from Russian by Alex Shvartsman); another woman faces mysterious strangers and an illness along “The Greenway” in Susan Palwick’s new story; Sean Monaghan reveals why you shouldn’t trust “The Man with the Ruined Hand”; a woman copes with an extreme fetish in “The Moribund” by Lavie Tidhar; and Will Ludwigsen charms us with “The Imaginative Youngster’s Handbook to UFOs.”
Robert Silverberg’s Reflections considers: “The Multiplicity of Mermaids”; James Patrick Kelly’s On the Net looks at AI audio and says, “Welcome to Just Okay”; Kelly Jennings’s On Books reviews works by Mary Soon Lee, Ray Nayler, Chuck Tingle, Charlie Jane Anders, and others; Kelly Lagor’s Thought Experiment shines a light on “Bradbury and Truffaut’s Empathy in Fahrenheit 451”; plus we’ll have an array of poetry, our yearly Index, and our 40th Annual Readers’ Award ballot!
You’ll find our January/February 2026 issue on sale at newsstands on December 8, 2025. Or subscribe to Asimov’s—in paper format or our own downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We’re also available individually or by subscription via Amazon.com’s Kindle Unlimited, BarnesandNoble.com’s Nook, and Magzter.com/magazines!
SHORT STORY
by Susan Palwick
We had Mama in the shed when the caravan came. It was still hard winter, the ground too frozen to dig, and she was frozen that hard in the shed, too. The parts of her that would grow would be safe. They’d wake up when it warmed.
I’d wanted her safely planted with us, home forever, but I had a gut feeling a caravan might get here before that could happen. Don’t ask me why: they don’t come through here often. Our last one was eight years ago, which is one reason we have so many crops here, because most of our dead stay. Maybe I was just being superstitious.
by John Richard Trtek
I entered Reio’s corner of the Wayside Eatareña only to swear under my breath when I saw two guys eyeing my favorite picnic table with more than casual interest. Fortunately, they chose the next booth instead, and so I was able to slip in and stake my own claim. Then, as if on cue, Reio himself emerged from the order shed and approached with food in hand.
“You saw me coming,” I said amiably, slipping my bag off one shoulder to sit down beneath translucent awnings.
“Knew you were coming,” replied Reio as he presented a cardboard tray loaded with my usual pair of chykkyn bustados, plus chips and an ubercup of raspberry lager. “Add to your sheet?” he asked.
DEPARTMENTS
by Sheila Williams
After a two-year hiatus, it was a thrill to attend the 83rd World Science Fiction Convention that was held in Seattle, Washington last summer. Unfortunately, I can’t fit in everything I did, every person I saw, and every person I missed, but here’s a short synopsis of my trip. I arrived on Wednesday, August 13, and hung out at a lovely room party hosted by Amy Thomson and Edd Vick. In addition to the hosts, the party gave me a chance to see Naomi Kritzer, Brenda Cooper, Astrid Bear, and others. The next morning I met Locus Magazine editor in chief, Liza Groen Trombi. READ MORE
Reflections: The Multiplicity of Mermaids
by Robert Silverberg
One of the funniest science-fantasy stories ever written was L. Sprague de Camp’s “Nothing in the Rules,” which first appeared in the July 1939 issue of the once highly cherished fantasy magazine, Unknown, and has been reprinted many times since. The story concerns a minor-league swimming meet, for which Herbert Laird, the coach of one team, exasperated by the series of victories that his rival, Louis Connaught, has achieved by using a swimmer who happens to have webbed fingers, has brought in a ringer of his own: a woman who enters the pool area in a wheelchair. The lower half of her body is concealed by a blanket, which at Laird’s instruction she pulls aside to reveal a pair of horizontal flukes, like those of a porpoise. Laird has recruited a mermaid for his swimming team. READ MORE
by Kelly Jennings
I very nearly didn’t read The Sign of the Dragon (JABberwocky, 2025), by Mary Soon Lee. This is because it’s a 580-page story in verse—an epic, according to its cover. I had my doubts that anyone in the twenty-first century could successfully write an epic. (My doctorate focused on Greek and Roman literature, and I have opinions about epics.) But I read the first couple of pages and I was caught. This is indeed an epic, and it’s brilliant. READ MORE
by James Patrick Kelly
Several years ago, while casting around for a column idea on a cold Sunday afternoon in December, I decided to interview Chatbot 3.0 partly as an experiment, mostly as a joke. My expectations were low because AI had been perpetually “ten years away” since the turn of the century. However, I was immediately taken aback by the bot’s flawless grammar and amused by its clever answers. In less than an hour it had generated a just okay column in response to my questions. I cut a couple of sentences and “An Interview With ChatGPT (12/18/2022)” ran otherwise unedited in the September/October 2023 issue. READ MORE