Current Issue Highlights
Our current issue features not one but two incredible novellas. Sam W. Pisciotta sends us to the eighteenth century, where married scientists try to tame chaos after traveling to the New World—but they find their reason is only “A Flame in the Dark.” Reader favorite Allen M. Steele also sends us back in time: we travel with his chrononauts to a major historic disaster—where the mission is to assure the deadly event comes to pass. Is it really “Better the Devil You Know”?
In a time-spanning tale, Sandra McDonald sends us on the “Last Train to Gertrude Stein”; Zack Be investigates neural implants and humanity’s inner wild via an insurance investigator with “Gumchew”; alternate history star Alan Smale sends us to Carthaginean General Hanibal’s war camp in 212 b.c.; in Robert Reed’s “Oliana’s Skull,” immortals are an ocean away; new to Asimov’s author Gregory Marlow’s narrator is “Seeking” while aliens arrive to Earth; also new to Asimov’s, Minister Faust’s ecoscaper Niang is back in Senegal fighting for a green future in “The Hydrological Cycle of Souls”; and our last author making his Asimov’s debut this issue, Karol Lagodzki, looks for hardwon hope in “Brother Adelbert’s Last Shift.”
Robert Silverberg explains why a successful story is one in which “One Thing Happens” in his Reflections column; Hear from “Worldwide Editors” in James Patrick Kelly’s On the Net; and Paul Di Filippo does a “Small Press Roundup” in On Books, reviewing works by Lois McMaster Bujold, Samuel Delaney, Geoff Ryman, Theodora Goss, Mike Allen, and L. Timmel Duchamp; plus we’ll have an array of poetry.
You’ll find our July/August 2026 issue on sale at newsstands on June 9, 2026. 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 Sandra McDonald
After Henri dies in their Versailles cottage—alive and joking on Christmas morning, flown to heaven before noon—Claudine needs a new purpose. She moves back to Paris, pays the movers to hoist her belongings up through the window of a cozy attic in the Latin Quarter, and begins teaching mortal tourists how to make tarte Tatin.
After all, she’s more than a thousand years old, give or take, with no heirs to dote on. Her condition makes childbirth impossible, and Henri sired no children elsewhere. Everything is in order—jewels and gold caches hidden throughout the city, overseas bank accounts in multiple names, legal trusts and contracts updated with a very expensive and long-lived firm of solicitors. Until her demise and next incarnation, then, she can host strangers in her humble accommodations. She can manage tart red apples, organic flour, and sugar caramelized on a hot plate, all served up with folklore and charm.
by Allen M. Steele
September 8, 1934; 1:30 a.m.
In the darkest hours of the cool autumn night, with sunrise still several hours away, the Atlantic Ocean seven miles off the New Jersey coast lay silent and still. The stars were masked behind thick rainclouds shrouding the night sky; when morning finally arrived, it would be with the amber glow to the east that an old nautical rhyme admonishes sailors to be wary, foul weather is approaching. But when the rain finally came, it would be welcome, for it would help control the inferno that would soon be blazing out here on the ocean.
Alone in the darkness, the cruise ship Morro Castle sailed the quiet waters. Now on the last leg of its latest nine-day round trip between New York and Havana, the liner was heading home, scheduled later this morning to drop anchor on the East River. There the two hundred passengers still asleep in their cabins, most of them East Coast residents, would disembark at the wharf where they expected to be picked up by friends and families.
DEPARTMENTS
The 2026 Must Read Books Award
by Emily Hockaday
The future of science fiction and the future of short fiction is in talented, capable hands. I can come to no other conclusion after co-judging the Must Read Books award for undergraduate writers and meeting the winner and most of the runners-up and honorable mentions. Rick Wilber and James Patrick Kelly co-judged the award with me, making this year’s judging an Asimov’s family affair.
Rick Wilber, co-founder—along with Sheila Williams—and director of the award, narrowed the submissions to a top pool of stories, which he, Jim, and I then read blind before sharing our rankings. READ MORE
Reflections: One Thing Happens
by Robert Silverberg
This column is based on the introduction to a collection of my short stories that was published some fifteen years ago. I was looking at it yesterday and, since my ideas of what makes a satisfactory short story (especially a science fiction short story) have not changed in those years, and the book itself may be unfamiliar to modern SF readers, I have adapted it to use as a column, thinking it might be useful to would-be writers, whose number, as always, is legion. (I was one of them myself, only about seventy-five years ago.) And so:
I offer herewith a couple of working definitions:
- A short story is a piece of prose fiction in which just one significant thing happens.
- A science fiction short story is a piece of prose fiction in which just one extraordinary thing happens. READ MORE
by Paul Di Filippo
The small—or “indie”—press that specializes in fantastika is basically as old as the genre itself. The entry on this topic from The Science Fiction Encyclopedia charts the origin of such enterprises back to the1920s, even before Hugo Gernsback birthed Amazing. The importance of these firms in pioneering good work that might otherwise go unpublished by larger houses—big enterprises that keep their eyes too firmly fixed on the empyrean of bestsellers to be aware of what’s happening right underfoot—cannot be overstated. READ MORE
by James Patrick Kelly
Editors have a tough job. They act as gatekeepers, but there are no set rules. Instead they rely on their knowledge of the field, their feel for the readership, their sense of what makes a story, and their intuition. The best of them serve both their readers and writers. I’ve asked three of these dedicated and often underpaid professionals from around the world to shed light on what they do and why they do it. Jonathan Strahan is an editor, anthologist, and book reviewer from Australia. He cofounded Eidolon: The Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy and currently acquires and edits for Reactor and Tor.com Publishing. Francesco Verso, an Italian novelist and editor, is cofounder and Editor-in-Chief at Future Fiction, an international publishing house that has published authors from fourteen languages and more than forty countries. Sara Chen is the director of the Science Fiction World’s Editorial Department and a winner of China’s Galaxy Award for Best Editor. SFW, founded in 1979, is the most influential and professional SF publishing house in China; Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem was first published there. READ MORE