Sci Phi Journal, Summer 2026/2
“613 Nanolux” by David Maskill
“The Myth of How Continuity Came to Be” by Márton Kispál
“The Summoning of Stellar Gods” by Lily Lachance
“Calculated Cut” by Andreas Flögel
“Earth Has Mail” by Richard Lau
“The Number That Shapes The Universe” by Giulia Cassarà
“Protopolis” by Georghe Sâsârman, Translated by Monica Cure
“subroutine_trace” by Martha Hipley
“Yet Still The Apertures Burned Cold” by A.P. Ritchey
“Should-Shock” by Paul Boltzmann
“A Roll Of The Quantum Dice” by R. Foster
Reviewed by Borealice Winters
To paraphrase, the editors of Sci Phi Journal describe their magazine on the site’s About page as a “cozy waystation” nestled between speculative philosophy, cultural anthropology, and hard SF. It is a station for concept rather than character, more Borges than Battlestar.
This focus is immediately apparent in David Maskill’s “613 Nanolux,” which presents a structure of titled micro-sections evocative of, say, J. G. Ballard’s “The Atrocity Exhibition.” In contrast to the almost Burroughs-esque tone of Ballard’s work, however, “613 Nanolux” is something almost spiritual. It’s a story of first contact gone wrong from an extraterrestrial perspective. When humans land on an unnamed world and begin taking soil samples, a local creature (our protagonist) accidentally kills one and kidnaps the remaining three. What follows is a philosophical exploration stemming from a single question: what if the human soul is visible and leaves measurable, albeit faint, traces (‘lux’ being a real-world measure of brightness, and therefore the titular ‘nanolux’ representing one-billionth of a lux, a brightness level too dim for the human eye to perceive)? It feels almost like a Simone Weil “gravity and grace”-style metaphor literalized as a speculative concept.
This concept, along with its concomitant explorations of fascinating problems in human philosophy (morality, the existence of God, possible solutions to the Fermi Paradox, etc.), is one to which the story is so dedicated that it uses shorthand to gloss over certain fundamental components that are arguably necessary for said concept to work. The reader is mostly left to suspend disbelief and take it for granted that a human and extraterrestrial society could surmount vast linguistic/cultural gulfs and establish strong enough communication to have deep discussions of anthropocentric philosophical problems; said problems are ones over which real-world philosophers, all being human and many of whom share language and/or cultural context, nevertheless bicker so fiercely. The fact that “613 Nanolux” glosses over these communication problems might harm its verisimilitude in the eyes of some readers. That said, as a reader who is interested in more foundational questions of first contact, I feel there are other places to look for such ideas (see, for example, much of the work of Stanisław Lem), and in treading its own ground, Maskill’s work represents a strong start to the issue.
Not all the stories in this issue have such a tone of gravitas.
“The Myth of How Continuity Came to Be” by Márton Kispál playfully takes the form of a museum-style guided audio tour whose subject is the corpse of God. Or is it? We learn from audio notes given by the figure whose corpse is on display that they seem to be an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances: the universe changes around him, but through the wounds he suffers, he can hold onto the things that matter. The result, much like in the previous story, “613 Nanolux,” is what feels like the speculative literalization of a metaphor. Yet, in the case of “The Myth of How Continuity Came to Be,” the metaphor is much more elusive, allusive, and, to me, potent. All this hinges on the tense contrast between dry analyses of God’s body (left patella, thorax, eyelids) and the emotively lyrical audio notes that accompany each exhibit.
If there is critique to levy toward “The Myth of How Continuity Came to Be,” it’s that, to me, it endeavors to be so much in so many ways that it doesn’t quite cohere. This is not nearly enough for me to dislike the story (in fact, I have similar thoughts about one of my favorite SF novels, M. John Harrison’s Light). However, it bears mentioning that the conceit of the audio tour teeters on the precipice of feeling like a gimmick, the main character’s realizations about himself and the world feel like they never quite find as much strength or focus as concepts underlying them portend, and there are several ideas that beg for exploration beyond what the work itself offers. The overall feeling I leave the piece with is one I can’t name, but I’m sure I will continue to think about both the feeling and the piece itself after I’ve finished writing this review.
Next in sequence is Lily Lachance’s “The Summoning of Stellar Gods,” whose opening paragraph almost evokes the opening paragraph of the preceding story, and whose concept plays with similar ideas as the first story. The narration we read is, in diegesis, a spoken monologue wherein the extraterrestrial narrator calls for their people to reenact first contact with humans in a reverie of flailing tentacles. I mentioned in the above review of the first story, “613 Nanolux,” that said piece expects the reader to take for granted the intercommunicability of human and extraterrestrial concepts. This story goes further in questioning that idea. Here, a series of almost comical misunderstandings turn what, to humanity, was a mundane and pointless first contact into a transcendent religious heritage for the species our protagonist belongs to. I come away feeling as if all of this may be a metaphor for how humans culturally express their earthly religions.
As the easiest read of the pieces so far encountered, exhibiting a clear connection between its themes and straightforward final reflection on its central concept, “The Summoning of Stellar Gods” buttresses the previous two pieces nicely and offers a welcome break from the more abstract and experimental approaches seen thus far. While all the pieces in this issue have been about reconciling a desire for spiritualism with the indifference of the universe, it’s Lachance’s piece that, for me, does so in a way that most straightforwardly links it to humanity’s cultural concerns in a way almost more emotional than theoretical.
This fact is especially interesting given what follows. This article you’re reading is a review of the stories and not the essays present in this issue of Sci Phi Journal, meaning the essays are technically outside the scope of discussion; nevertheless, I want to point out that directly after Lachance’s piece, we find an essay that argues for a certain view of important speculative fiction. That view is as follows: SF that centers character-driven internal struggles over a backdrop of speculation allows readers to explore the relationship between humans and technology at a time when such questions are of utmost cultural importance. Depending on how you interpret it, this seems to be at odds with how Sci Phi Journal’s editors describe the goals of their ideas-first magazine on the website’s About page. An ideas-first approach does not necessarily preclude an interest in the emotional concerns of humans, but there is an interesting fuzziness to the line between ideas-driven and character-driven SF. Of the pieces so far, it is Lachance’s piece, in presenting a yearning for purpose and spiritual connection with such emotional clarity, that feels the most effective; I’d argue that in synthesizing an ideas-first approach with a clear corollary to human culture and concerns, it presents something that the more abstract and outwardly intellectual “613 Nanolux” and “The Myth of How Continuity Came to Be” grasp for, but are almost too high concept to hold.
With the close of the essay, as if said essay is a liminal space between two different buildings with different purposes and furnishings, the issue seems to change theme. If the first three stories involved speculative explorations of spirituality and mythopoeia, then the stories that follow seem to explore the impact of scientific change on the structure of society. I call the next story, not without some pleasure in inflicting a pun on anyone who reads the review, the “cutting word” between these two themes; just as any good haiku has a “cutting word” which separates its parts, “Calculated Cut” by Andreas Flögel cuts the issue viscerally (in both the etymological and the more common meaning of the word) and, in doing so, introduces a different energy to the issue as a whole. Here, the unnamed protagonist relates her ultimately doomed relationship with Sia, a woman who, as some form of performance art, allows her genetically modified body to be ritually dismembered and served as dinner to the members of an enthusiastic audience. The piece, far shorter than those we’ve seen thus far, is fittingly like a quick knife cut, effective in the way it causes pain and something akin to beauty in its spill of sanguineous color. It’s a jarring contrast from what comes before and much of what comes after, but it is also a welcome one. It is also the most character-first piece in the entire issue. I have to imagine the essay leading this piece would philosophically gel with it more than with any other in the issue.
“Earth Has Mail” by Richard Lau has an almost Pynchonian flair to it with its delightful acronyms (compare ‘SEPTIC’ in this story with Pynchon’s ‘WASTE’) and its borderline irreverent plot, in which workers at the SEPTIC institute, Thierry and Kellie, scan scam emails sent to Earth from Venus. Beneath its fun exterior are serious questions: how do we treat a growing and mostly worthless mass of online information in a way where we preserve what’s important? “Earth Has Mail” presents a darkly funny but ultimately pessimistic answer to this question in the form of a clever turn at the end. If “Calculated Cut” was a harsh shot of cutting spirit, then “Earth Has Mail” is a smooth and pleasant chaser.
To me, of the stories in this issue “The Number That Shapes The Universe” by Giulia Cassarà, more closely embodies the vision described in Sci Phi Journal by its editors of an ‘idea-driven’ magazine than any story which preceded it. It asks a single question: what would happen to the people and nations of Earth if a fundamental mathematical constant, in this case being the fine-structure constant that quantifies subatomic electromagnetic interactions, changed suddenly? The piece explores this question by posing as the transcript of a documentary, one in which multiple interviewees, among them a meteorologist, a national defense analyst, a couple of physicists, and a schoolteacher, discuss their perspectives on and rationalizations of an irrational event.
Full disclosure: I’m far more of a humanities guy than a science guy, and even my qualifications in the former are dubious at best. As such, I do not feel confident judging whether some of the effects of the changing constant listed in the story (certain redshift effects, potential ramifications on human health, on photosynthesis, etc.) are reasonable. I can, however, say they brim with verisimilitude. If you’re a reader searching for the promised land of hard, idea-forward SF, I believe this is the story you should look forward to. For those of you who want the human angle, there’s no one character whose internal struggle dominates the piece, but the ultimate thesis, if there is one, focuses more on the common man than on the mathematician or on mathematics. Much like Lachance’s “The Summoning of Stellar Gods,” it is the tie to human impact that makes the work feel meaningful.
It is, as always with translated works, a little difficult to judge “Protopolis” by Georghe Sâsârman (translated by Monica Cure). What in a work belongs to the author and what belongs to the translator can be hard to determine, as technical language, neologisms, and even entire speculative elements are sometimes shifted by the translator to elucidate them for an audience hailing from a different cultural and linguistic background. (As an example in the realm of SF, see Michael Kandel’s genius translations of several Stanisław Lem works.) As such, I can’t say how much the almost clinical style of “Protopolis” belongs to Sâsârman, to Cure, or to some combination of both; what is undeniable is that distant perspective and clear prose are effective at conveying its end. What is that end? It’s similar to the preceding “The Number That Shapes The Universe” in the sense that both are almost literary games where the author sets up a single event and unspools the consequences through prose. But whereas “The Number That Shapes The Universe” explores a maximal, universal implementation of this concept, “Protopolis” asks the following: what if a single society felt compelled to build a dome over the heads of its people? Put more broadly: what if humans isolated themselves from all outside influences, from all natural or societal pressures, and lived in a bubble of absolute safety? Sâsârman’s answer is compelling; in a world where technology separates us more and more from the challenges our ancestors faced, it is also perhaps, at least metaphorically, prescient: might we in spirit share the fate of the Protopolitans, and if we do, is it a fate we should fear or embrace?
This last question is left almost entirely as an exercise to the reader. In this sense, it perhaps lacks a measure of human focus. The concept is described in such a clinical way that some readers might find it almost artificial. Perhaps, in this sense, it is the most purely “idea-forward” piece in the entire issue.
I feel compelled, again, to specify that the editors chose to break up the chain of stories here with a second essay (one which is worth reading, but one I won’t describe here). The first essay split the issue into two sections, one of religion and one of society. This second essay, then, breaks the issue fiction-wise into rough thirds. The previous two sections relate, respectively, to SF religion and SF society; there is no such clear connective tissue that I could trace between the last set of fictions, but the stories are nonetheless individually compelling.
Martha Hipley’s “subroutine_trace” is a vision of how technology’s cold claw deracinates nature from its natural place, and how, perhaps, nature pushes technology beyond its intended purpose. The death of a single sheep in a flock migrating across terraformed Martian soil causes unforeseen changes for our protagonist, an autonomous drone programmed to shepherd said sheep. By the end, the question whether the drone is still a shepherd or it has become a more primal part of the Martian ecosystem is posed to the reader in a way that, for me, questions by way of metaphor our changing role in a variety of Earth ecosystems as hunters and as shepherds, and how we have fitted our planet with skyscrapers and roads to cut through inimical nature in a manner analogous to terraforming inimical planets.
If we consider “subroutine_trace” is a look at how technology affects extraterrestrial nature without the influence of a human lens, then “Yet Still The Apertures Burned Cold” by A.P. Ritchey is the opposite: an effect on a particular human individual and the planet he, and we, call home. When an unnamed group of Earth scientists create teleportation technology by cutting two holes in space, they struggle to find a worthy volunteer until our protagonist, Jason, steps forward. The test has unexpected effects on the world at large, and maybe, just maybe, on Jason himself. The piece is smart and entertaining (especially for someone like me who has often wondered whether teleporters are, to paraphrase Ritchey’s incisive description, ‘part fax machine and part paper shredder’ vis-à-vis the human body), yet it at times feels like the joining of two stories that never quite cohere for me. There is a small-scale story about Jason and a large-scale story about unfathomable timespans. Both have enough meat to warrant their own story, and while there is a bridge between them, it feels a little tenuous. It is, despite this, absolutely worth a read.
At the beginning of this review I mentioned that Borges is a model of the sort of fiction favored by the editors of Sci Phi Journal. Perhaps nowhere is this more obvious to me, at least in concept, than in “Should-Shock” by Paul Boltzmann. The premise is this: a man, the sole surviving member of an unspecified starship crew, awakens in the medical bay of an interplanetary freighter after being rescued from the aftermath of a bizarre incident, one in which the members of the protagonist’s crew seemed to lose the ability to agree about anything. When the same fate begins to befall the freighter’s crew, it seems the problem stems from the crew’s struggles to speak in abstract generalities about anything, a trouble caused by a fear of imprecision or offense that seems to stem from the unnamed organization to which the freighter and the original starship belong.
Though the surrounding context and circumstances are different, I am reminded of Borges’s “Funes the Memorious,” in which a similar breakdown in the ability to generalize objects into categories occurs. Borges’s end is more philosophical while Boltzmann’s seems to be more satirical, but both succeed in exploring the implications of hypers-specificity in thought and language. I suspect the degree to which a reader enjoys this particular piece is concomitant with the degree to which a reader agrees with the trends it’s satirizing, to the degree which it feels either like a timely satire or a strawman.
“A Roll Of The Quantum Dice” by R. Foster rounds out the issue with a strong voice and a concept that bridges the speculative and the metaphorical. The first-person protagonist, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore Labs, explains to you, in the second person, about a special set of dice created to showcase quantum effects on a macro and personal scale. Lyrical descriptions of the dice and their consequences follow. The last sentence of this story, of the issue, is a metaphysical statement directed at you, the reader. While I won’t spoil it, I will say that I come away questioning my earlier speculation that each segment of fiction in this issue, delineated by essays, had some overarching theme. Perhaps the organizational principle was nothing but a roll of the dice.
Despite my small critiques, just about every story in this issue has something thoughtful at its core. If Sci Phi Journal is a “cozy waystation,” it’s not one that you depart from without the chill of some small epiphany.