Asimov’s, September/October 2025
“A Tide of Paper” by Leah Cypess
“Strays” by Scott William Carter
“The Last of Operation Shroud” by Alexander Jablokov
“The Expurgator” by Shiwei Zhou
“Tenth Contact” by Bruce Sterling & Paul Di Filippo
“The Night Heron Rescue” by Alice Towey
“The Ghost” by John Kessel
“Lolo’s Last Run” by E. M. Kerkman
“Frankenstein’s Book Launch” by Karen Heuler
“The Signal and the Idler” by Ted Kosmatka
Reviewed by Mina
This collection of stories showcases human weaknesses and strengths in all their technicolour glory.
“A Tide of Paper” by Leah Cypess is a detective story set in Renaissance Venice. Samuel and Joseph, Spanish Christian converts who still practise their faith in secret, come across a murder in their business dealings. Who killed the Jewish printer and why? Samuel is pushed to discover the truth by his sudden ability to see ghosts.
There were layers of irony in this tale, as shown by my favourite quote: “Since I am no good at lying, a serious inconvenience when my whole life is a lie, I have learned how to wield the truth as a weapon.”
“Strays” by Scott William Carter made me cry. It’s a very well-written, psychologically complex tale. A husband and wife team have spent years hunting down and destroying stray missiles from a long-forgotten war. But what if you discover that a missile has lifeforms on it? What if you disagree about what to do about it? Woven into this conundrum is a very real, very human relationship. And I love the way the meaning of the title changes completely by the end of the tale.
“The Last of Operation Shroud” by Alexander Jablokov is oddly gripping. We follow Alma who, years after the end of a war, struggles to finish her last mission. Her prosthetic foot is not the problem but her very specific memory loss is—she remembers nothing about her squad. Alma needs to find their bodies but, to do that, she must find the remains of a ship armed with a Shroud. This device hides the ship by causing confusion and memory loss in anyone close to it. The author gets the balance right, showing Alma’s mental confusion but still giving a clear enough account of events. It slowly becomes clear how tough Alma is because she finishes her old mission despite the effects of the Shroud.
My favourite quote is a moment where Alma remembers her dead husband: “Like any intelligence operation, marriage is a delicate dance between the spoken and unspoken.”
“The Expurgator” by Shiwei Zhou is ultimately a sad story. The narrator is visiting her grandmother in China and goes with her to an expurgator who cures her myopia. She returns to the expurgator on her own and asks the expurgator to get rid of her Chinese accent in English as she wants to fit in back in her new home, the US. She is too young to understand that losing an unwanted accent comes with losing her connection to her past and her culture. It’s a good depiction of the pressure immigrants can feel to fit in, whatever the cost.
“Tenth Contact” by Bruce Sterling & Paul Di Filippo shows us the hubris of space travel. It’s a very wordy but gentle parody of first-contact stories. Three astronauts on Ganymede decide to capture and study some of the life forms from the moon’s underground oceans. They make this decision in the midst of being caught in a cosmic natural disaster.
It all felt a bit pointless (which I think was the point), but I learned the word “panspermia”.
In the “The Night Heron Rescue” by Alice Towey, Mella has to work at a bird shelter for her community service, after taking the rap for a boy she thinks she is in love with. Although there is a curse and a heron shifter in this story, it is really about how Mella learns what is truly important and how to stand up to peer pressure. A simple tale but well done—we really care about Mella’s struggles as she begins her path to adulthood.
The protagonists of “The Ghost” by John Kessel are a young H. G. Wells and his wife, “Jane”. A party in a country manor to perform a play is just the background to this tale. It’s not a happy tale, but it’s rewarding in its psychological complexity. It asks good questions about marriage, loyalty, illusions and self-delusion. And what exactly do H.G. and Jane see in the chapel?
I could have quoted large chunks of this thoughtful and thought-provoking tale—definitely worth a read.
The protagonist in “Lolo’s Last Run” by E. M. Kerkman is a spirit. As part of the Spirit Rescue Service in Alaska, they inhabit a dead body in a crevasse. They are used to recovering people, sometimes dead, sometimes alive. But this time, they are followed by the spirit of a dead dog, Lolo. After delivering the dead body, the spirit joins Lolo in one last run. A surprisingly touching story.
“Frankenstein’s Book Launch” by Karen Heuler is about just that. Frankenstein’s “monster” reads from his book and tells of how he got his ultimate revenge on his creator. It’s not a complicated story but it examines the constant self-justification of the murderer, and the unhealthy fascination of those who buy his book.
The Signal and the Idler” by Ted Kosmatka is very good. On the surface, the story is that Porter is broke and very down on his luck, until he becomes a subject in a “double-blind” experiment that pays well for seemingly little effort. Then the science kicks in: unless you’re studying quantum physics, economics, maths and computer science, your brain will hurt at the end of this tale. But in a good way. Because the twist, even only half-understood by this reviewer, is glorious.