Clarkesworld is a Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning science fiction and fantasy magazine. Each month we bring you a mix of fiction, articles, interviews and art. Our September 2026 issue (#240) contains:Fiction* "Water-Eaters" by Beth Goder* "When Humans Are No Longer Born Human" by Zhu Yixuan* "To Walk This Distant Shore with You" by A.D. Sui* "And So I Open My Fists" by Rachel Sobel* "Fistful of Antimatter" by Rich Larson* "Count...

Klara and the Sun meets S. A. Barnes’s Dead Silence with a touch of Becky Chambers’ A Psalm for the Wild-Built in Nebula Award-winning author A.D. Sui’s darkly philosophical murder mystery, as a death monk and a team of researchers trapped onboard a spaceship of the dead encounter something beyond human understanding…Vessel Iris has devoted himself to the Starlit Order, performing funeral rites for the dead across the galaxy, guiding soul...

A pair of monastic siblings struggle to help a sentient spaceship suffering through an existential crisis in this philosophical novel about what constitutes life, love, humanity, and death for fans of Martha Wells’s The Murderbot Diaries and The Deep Sky by Yume Kitasei.Unable to forgive himself for his actions aboard the Counsel of Nicaea, Iris left the religious Starlit...

Nearly ten years after Inez Kato sustained a career-ending injury during a military exercise gone awry, she lies, cheats, and seduces her way to the very top, to destroy the fleet that she was once a part of, even at the cost of her own life.Ennis Rezál, Third Daughter of the Rule, has six months left to live. She is desperate to end the twenty-year war she was birthed to fight. But when she brings Inez aboard the mothership, a chess game of manipulation and double-crossing begins ...

The first issue of Heartlines Spec contains the challenges, and joys, and frustrations that come from long-lasting connections. It’s a mother you never understood, a friendship that’s fierce but changing, the quiet gratitude of sipping champagne with someone you love. All the stories and poems within feature partners, families, lovers, and friends. The relationships between them are varied but strong.Editorial by Rebecca BennettShort FictionRedline b...

This sapphic cli-fi thriller is a love letter to hope in the bleakest of times, combining the multiverse-bending drama of This Is How You Lose the Time War with the cat-and-mouse chase of Killing Eve**.**On a near-future Earth devastated by climate change, Dr. Cassandra Barlowe is right where she wants to be: working on an island of floating trash in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as far away fr...

Frost Bites Ghostly Drabbles is a mini-anthology of bite-sized stories and poems in the tradition of telling a ghost story for Christmas.These pieces are not necessarily set on Christmas, but each 100-word drabble or 200-word double-drabble does feature a ghost of one kind or another.