Authors in This Issue

“A Flame in the Dark” by Sam W. Pisciotta

Sam W. Pisciotta hurtles through space-time on the power of morning coffee and late-night tea. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Nightmare Magazine, Analog, and Asimov’s. He is a graduate of the Odyssey Writers Workshop and holds an M.A. in Literary Studies from the University of Colorado. Find him at www.silo34.com and on Bluesky @swpisciotta.bsky.social. The author’s latest work takes us to the Age of Enlightenment in eighteenth-century America, where reason to dispel the horrors of chaos.

 

“Gumchew” by Zack Be

Zack Be is an author, obscure songwriter, and couples/sex therapist who completed his Ph.D. at University of Maryland in 2025. His fiction has appeared in Analog, Asimov’s, and Writers of the Future Vol. 36. His story “Locus of Control” was the winner of the 2024 Jim Baen Memorial Science Fiction Award, and he is the editor of the Inner Workings anthology, available now from Calendar of Fools. More info about Zack’s writing and music can be found at zackbe.com or anywhere on social media @bezackbe. His latest for Asimov’s follows a claims investigator into a world of zoomorphic gene editing and memory implants where anyone can become anything—including their true selves.

 

“Roma Delenda Est” by Alan Smale

Alternate history enthusiast and two-time Sidewise Award-winner Alan Smale <www.alansmale.com, www.facebook.com/alan.smale, bsky.app/profile/alansmale.bsky.social, twitter.com/AlanSmale, www.linkedin.com/in/alansmale> is the author of the Clash of Eagles trilogy, featuring a Roman invasion of Mississippian America, and the Cold War alternate space race series Apollo Rising. His previous tales for Asimov’s have explored the wilds of Mongolia and deepest, darkest England, the windy dunes of Kitty Hawk, and the bloody Colosseum in Caracalla’s Rome. In his latest tale he kidnaps us into the great Carthaginian general Hannibal’s war camp in Italy in 212 BC.

 

“Last Train to Gertrude Stein” by Sandra McDonald

Sandra McDonald lives in Florida, where she fosters many children, collects innumerable books, rescues an infinite number of homeless cats, and confiscates bottles of water from unwitting travelers at airport checkpoints. A military veteran and veteran teacher, she is the author of several books and several dozen published short stories. She had a website listing her works and awards, but it picked itself up and went wandering off to parts unknown. You can sometimes find her on social media, but more likely she is stuck in a minivan in a school pickup line, scribbling story ideas on the back of store receipts. Sandra tells us that in the middle of a widespread garbage strike, she fell in love with springtime Paris—the boulevards and bookstores, the brasseries and the boulangeries. Lessons in baking tartes brought her to the street where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas once threw bright parties under the darkening clouds of war. Comfort can be found in cozy kitchens, but flour and sugar are no substitutes for vigilance no matter how many centuries old you are or certain you are of your own survival.

 

“Brother Adalbert’s Last Shift” by Karol Lagodzki

Karol Lagodzki <BlueSky: @klagodzki.bsky.social, Instagram and Threads: @karol_lagodzki, Website: klagodzki.com>, a native of Poland, is an exophonic, English-language author of fiction. His stories have appeared in Invisible City, Storm Cellar, NUNUM, Streetlight Magazine, and elsewhere, and he has won Panel Magazine’s Ruritania Prize for Short Fiction. His first full-length book, Controlled Conversations, a story of perseverance under an authoritarian regime, was a finalist for the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. Karol lives halfway down a Southern Indiana ravine with his wonderful family, a scurry of squirrels, a passel of possums, a gaze of raccoons, a descent of woodpeckers, and a large dog. His Asimov’s debut, “Brother Adalbert’s Last Shift,” strives to find hope in a seemingly hopeless world.

 

“Seeking” by Gregory Marlow

Gregory Marlow (He/Him) is an associate professor, animator, and writer living in East Tennessee with his wife, Amanda, and dog, Sadie. He has animated on over a dozen video game titles, and some of his short fiction publications include PodCastle, Strange Horizons, Flash Fiction Online, and The LeVar Burton Reads podcast. Find him online at gregmarlow.com. Gregory’s first story for Asimov’s is a love letter to Arthur C. Clarke about the unyielding grip of addiction during a world-changing first contact event.

 

“Oliana’s Skull” by Robert Reed

The author tells us, “Most of my recent work is focused on my dear old friend, the Great Ship. Some GS stories appear in established magazines. Asimov’s, for example. Others get sent straight up to Kindle. A story called ‘The Neighbor’ was one of those self-published efforts. My favorite chapter takes my protagonist to a habitat where mortal humans live on one side of a deep, narrow sea, while the other shoreline is jammed with immortals from a multitude of species. An intriguing setting, and later, wanting to learn more about the realm, I decided to write a second novelette. ‘Oliana’s Skull’ was always set on the mortal shoreline. At the beginning, I was convinced that the second city and those giant aquatic aliens would be allowed their own chapters. But alas, there wasn’t room. Millions of watery brains and tens of thousands of years of history . . . that’s more than enough terrain as it is.”

 

“The Translation of the Sirens” Matthew De Abaitua

Matthew De Abaitua’s <@mdeabaitua.bsky.social > debut novel The Red Men was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award and adapted into a short film, “Dr. Easy,” by directors Shynola for Warp Films/Film4. IF THEN (Angry Robot, 2015) and The Destructives (Angry Robot, 2016) complete his first trilogy of novels. His short story “The Escape Hatch” was included in Best of British Science Fiction 2018, edited by Donna Scott. His story is a historical account of a padre and a stretcher bearer making a recording of siren song during the First World War.

 

“The Hydrological Cycle of Souls, or The Assembler of Scattered Creations” by Minister Faust

Minister Faust <bsky.app/profile/writelikeamf.bsky.social> is best known for his cult-classic novel and Philip K. Dick Award-finalist and Locus Best First Novel-finalist The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, and his PKD-runner-up and Kindred-winner Shrinking the Heroes. His short fiction and journalism are published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, and he offers online master classes in fiction writing called Write Like a MF (and I’m not kidding—MF stands for “Master of Fiction”) <https://writelikeamf.samcart.com/products/write-like-a-mf-the-four-core-transform-like-a-mf-bundle-lifetime-access>. Currently, he’s writing a series of interlocking eco-optimistic short stories for an eventual Martian Chronicles-style novel called Great Green Sahara.

 

“Better the Devil You Know…” by Allen M. Steele

The cover story of our October/November 1997 issue was “. . . Where Angels Fear to Tread,” a novella that went on to win a Hugo Award, a Locus Award, and the annual Readers’ Poll Award, and to also be nominated for the Nebula and Sturgeon awards. Although it was later expanded into a full-length novel, Chronospace (since then retitled Time Loves a Hero), Allen continued to wonder what happened afterward. “It took more than twenty-five years for me to realize that because this is about time travel, I can instead look into what happened before the earlier tale.” This new story stands on its own, with no knowledge of the previous one needed. Once again, a team of chrononauts from the twenty-fourth century returns to the 1930s to visit a major disaster . . . not to study what caused it, but to try to stop someone from preventing it from happening!