Righ, so this was meant to be my final post of 2025, but somehow, I never got around to doing those last edits and pressing “Publish” in time. I’m sure all of you have survived the wait, though. So here are the story recommendations for December/January.
Loneliness Universe by Eugenia Triantafyllou (Uncanny):
The story starts out with our protagonist, Nefeli, having returned to Greece after her studies, where she is trying to reconnect with her childhood friend. Only, it isn’t going so well, and Nefeli starts to realize it is not just her inability to connect with people that is the problem. No, she is gradually shifting into to some sort of parallel universe, living separately from her loved one and only able to communicate with people she knows through the internet.
Even her brother, whom she lives with, slips out of her life, present only by the food he buys, which also shows up in Nefeli’s world. As the story progresses, Nefeli tries to cope by finding new friends and new ways of forming communities, but the answer to her problem, if there truly is an answer, might lie somewhere she does not expect.
There are many Covid inspired stories out there, but this is one of the first I’ve read which I really enjoyed. I loved how real and familiar Nefeli and her situation seemed, despite it all being very unreal. And I loved the depth Triantafyllou managed to add to the themes centered on loneliness and community. Though, in many ways this was not a story where one single thing stood out as a strength; it was just a really good, well-rounded story. Deep, entertaining, and well crafted.
They Return by Eleanna Castroianni (Psychopomp):
This a hauntingly beautiful story, a rare instance of the prose itself being the thing that really hooked me.
The story takes place in an imaginary village in Greece where the dead come alive once a year at New Year’s Eve. They don’t do much except go with their living relatives to eat dinner, sleep, and return to their grave the next day. As it turns out, though, family dinners can be horrible enough by themselves, never mind having to suffer your dead relatives.
Honestly, the plot and characters were fine, without ever really blowing me away. The writing, though, that really shone. Every description, every little phrase seemed to build on both the eeriness of the walking dead and the horror of having to suffer family members you would rather have stay dead. You could tell this was a story where the writer had thought about every little word and its placement in the story.
So if eeriness gorgeous prose is your thing, I can definitely recommend “They Return”.
Here at the Freezing End by Benjamin C Kinney (The Sunday Morning Transport; originally published in Analog):
I’ll be honest; I’m not usually a big fan of hard science fiction, so I didn’t really expect that one of my favorite stories of the month was one originally published in Analog (which is very much a hard SF magazine). But it was, and, admittedly, it was because the story didn’t seem to lean that much into the hard spectrum of SF after all. Still, it was a pleasant surprise.
The story follows the rescue team belonging to a research station on a faraway, icy planet. Problem is, the empire that founded the station is dead or dying, and the station is left to its own accord on a planet that does not suit human biology in any way. And the rescue mission they are on is not so much that as a scavenging mission, trying to prolong the life of the station inhabitants a little longer.
Above them, pods from some spaceship are dropping to the ground, and one of them is just within reach of the rescuers/scavengers before the predators roaming the planet will get there.
But the party’s troubles are just starting, because the people on board the pod are not all dead. So the question becomes, how do they prioritize? Will they help the survivors, knowing they won’t have long left anyway, or do they focus on helping the people in the station, essentially prolonging their misery.
I really enjoyed this story. It had interesting characters and a solid plot, but it was, once again, the writing that really stood out to me. The descriptions, the setting details, the unique sensory details, they made the story world jump off the page and made the story such much more believable.
Toby Backman 