Given my stated intent of plugging the gap in these brief highlight round-ups of easy-to-access speculative fiction, it’s appropriate that all the stories I’m waving the flag for here came out in the last quarter of 2025. Let’s dive in!
Working back from the most recent of my recommendations, we begin with Omenana Magazine, which “aims to promote and celebrate the diversity and richness of African speculative fiction and poetry, and to provide a platform for writers to share their stories and ideas with a global audience” – in December’s issue specifically focusing on stories centred around the Niger Delta.
For me the standout was The Last Fisher of Oporoza by Tomilola Adejumo, a very nice example of the Groundhog Day trope. Adejumo gives plenty of cultural and environmental detail to make this now familiar foundation distinctive, then builds on it by introducing glimpses of the forces responsible for this forever looping day, and quite possibly for much more besides.
The story critiques (complacently utopian) external interests that seem quite comfortable treating the protagonist’s community and their environment as, in one sense or another, a resource to be exploited. I particularly appreciated that this is not a version of the trope where success is measured or rewarded by resolution, but one in which small victories accumulate into incremental improvements of the community’s shared condition: the best, because achievable, kind of utopia.
Next up was Issue 11 of the always reliable Radon Journal and Elisabeth Ring’s sort-of-body-horror Like an Arm Outstretched, Reaching. Sort of, I say, not because the physioillogical element lacks grue, but as a more mundane social horror is right there next to it to provide further disturbance. I refer here to the pernicious… (how to put it? Well, “evil” doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch) …evil that is the medical insurance industry.
I won’t spoil why one might discover the need for that kind of coverage (the title may have you way ahead of me already), but that’s not the only kind of coverage the protagonist feels in need of. Themes of distress and dysmorphia abound, not to mention society’s disinterested rubber-necking of The Other; but there’s also a brazen taking ownership of oneself in a way that hints at unexpected strength of character. Squint, and this might be an origin story…
Also from that issue, a brief shout-out to Parker M. O’Neill for Instructions for Self-Reflection, a tight little tale from the other side of the mirror that starts with a discomforting tone and only gets darker as we get closer to the surface.
Pleasure of a certain sort, that is. Gowpen is a prison story, sinking us into the repetitive monotony of an environment where time loses focus, where it seems every day is intake day, every day is Wednesday, and every night is plagued by dreams far more vivid and alive than the waking experience, dreams that may bestow freedom from confinement in a very final way.
Author Max Olesen tells a sinister, effective tale, similar to another piece he has in ergot., The Tunnels, which shares the hallucinatory sense of confinement, lost time, lost people, and uncertain self that is found here. This story takes it up a notch, though; while The Tunnels injects a touch of pathos, and deadpan humour, in its narrator’s self-talky mannerisms and anxious drive to exceed his limitations, Gowpen is a place where guilty people go to endure themselves, from which the only way out is one you wouldn’t want to take. Unlike The Last Fisher of Oporoza, here you gain nothing good when forced to live the same day yet again.
