SHORT STORY REX July 2026

UNSURPRISING MAGAZINE REC: Seize the Press #14

Been feeling pretty demotivated lately (see below) but if you thought a new issue of STP dropped and I wasn’t gonna talk about it, you obviously thought wrong

The highlights begin at the beginning with Nelson Stanley's “The Most Beautiful Thing in This Black World”. Like the artists in his story, Stanley works a strange alchemy. His cityscapes are so vividly described here with their barbershops and 24-hour massage parlors, their people and their trash, some of my favorite writing of his to date. But the city is not a “character” as the cliche goes, it is instead a literal canvas upon which our protagonist is painted. For our friend the Connoisseur, the relationship between Life and Art is quite the sordid affair, but ultimately it's a transcendent one as well.

Then there's Kay Vaindal's “An American Execution” which, woowee…if I previously said of a different Vaindal story that it “speaks to our current moment” then what the hell am I going to say about this one? Seen through the garish prism of America 250, the brainrotted boyfriend, the dystopian nightmare of ICE, the 9/11 hijacker resurrected in order to be publicly executed, hell, just about everything in this story has ceased to seem like science fiction and/or fantasy or even horror, and is more like just a regular-degular part of life in 2026.

And “Ortolan” by Sylvia Warren is a sad yet sly story, monstrous period drama cooked to perfection. I had more or less an inkling what an ortolan was (a bird, right?) before I read it but decided ‘ehh, I'll look it up afterwards’, and I'd suggest you do the same if you're not already familiar. Bon appetit!

Lukewarm take/General recommendation for the world of short fiction at large: Git Gud or Get Got

So, considering all the AI-related news that has gone down in both "literary" (Granta, Commonwealth Prize) and "genre" ('Bella Chacha') short fiction spaces, it felt kind of necessary for me to share my two cents on the matter in this newsletter but the fact is it's all a bit too depressing to dedicate much more thought to.

So I'm not going to do a blow-by-blow of Bona Books' (very thorough and ethically coherent, imo) mea culpa and report, or of the angrier (and righteously so, imo) critiques their revelations inspired, nor will I relitigate all the frantic dogpiling that tried to negate said critiques, but: basically we had one side saying “👏Y’all 👏Need 👏To 👏 Do 👏Better" and the other saying "OMG it's hard tho!!!" 

"The industry is not prepared for this" has been a common refrain, but when I hear people say this I automatically wonder what exactly they mean by "industry". There's a short passage early in Joe Sacksteder's famous essay "Against Quirky Writing" which I still think about sometimes and which feels relevant when considering the ‘human resources’ aspect of this ‘industry’, because

outlets […] are independent and […] operate on thin to zero resources. Readers are often volunteering their time […] while trying to get their own work into the world. Submission guidelines for other journals might indeed be some of the twenty open tabs open on their browsers as they read for their venue, their capacity for sustained focus long gone. No wonder they might look at a submission only a minute or two before rejecting it.

He was referring to the "litmag" space but the situation in short SFF is not so different. Circumstances were precarious even before the AI slopocalypse. Applying any real depth of engagement to the output of the endless submissions firehose is not always an easy job (with the caveat that sometimes it is indeed easy, a lot of writing is instantly, obviously bad or rather, ‘wrong’). Still, it increasingly seems like at least some of the volunteers for the job have, for whatever reason, either not been suitably equipped for the task or been sorely derelict in their duties.

The problem isn’t that people don’t have time to carefully consider a story before rejecting it. Apparently, they don't have time to carefully consider a story before accepting it, either…

Some attribute it all to canons of taste. Yes, they argue, the AIs have managed to convincingly reproduce the surface hallmarks of a certain contemporary middle-of-the-road genre-mag aesthetic.¹ I.e., the plagiarism bots have learned to give their output titles like "The Machine-Breaker of Aba” or “Orbit Decay” instead of 20 stories all entitled "The Last Hope".

However (the argument goes), there are magazines that reject the standard baseline style which these LLMs have managed to statistically approximate. Instead they go all in on dark, sicko shit and are thus (the argument continues) naturally invulnerable to being compromised by AI slop.

And like, believe me, I'm sympathetic to that idea. My intuition, though, is that it would be actually pretty trivial for the current LLM models to recreate, for example, a superfically passable bit of "quirky writing" as described by Sacksteder, a cheap cheat-code to pass the filter of the overworked slusher. And I suspect it would likewise be trivial for it to extrude a superfically passable facsimile of some dark, sicko shit. More to the point, we already know of some well-regarded purveyors of "dark" or "weird” fiction that have themselves also 'got got'.

The real problem does not lie along this axis.

I think Gwen C Katz's thread got more at the heart of it, in a way that many responses to that thread seemed unwilling to engage with. Specifically, Katz took issue with the model of valorizing a piece of short fiction primarily, or even exclusively, in terms of premise. Not the execution, not the quality of thought in developing an idea, certainly not the prose (Heaven forbid!)--no, all that becomes secondary to the premise, to a synopsis one can fully elucidate in the space of a goddamn tweet.

“A queer woman building a machine from scrap metal amd rage to destroy her colonial oppressors? Of course we loved it.”

By their own admission, Bona Books accepted a story which they knew was no good² but apparently they just liked the thing it was about so damn much!

How did we get here? TV Tropes, Ao3 tags, etc are popular culprits as to the absolute State of Things, but I believe it's more accurate to point the finger slightly downstream of that model-kit mindset: the "wish list". As in, #MSWL, the Manuscript Wish List hashtag on Twitter (also apparently a website, I hear?), where literary agents describe types of book theyre interested in representing or acquiring, often couched in trope-forward shorthand (enemies-to-lovers, Cinnamon Bun, insert preferred unit of ragebait terminology here).

Pop narratology meets "have it your way" consumerism, nothing new to see here. And while the #MSWL hashtag has mainly to do with book-length work, short-fiction publishers will also sometimes (tongue partly in cheek, perhaps, but only partly) post "wish lists" of what they or their slush readers say they would like to see. These practices have always struck me as odd on principle; surely writers should just write what they want and editorial staff should just read it and decide if it's something they want to publish?

The phrase ”meet the brief” showed up a bunch in the Bona Books report and ensuing discussion, referring to how stories fit with the themes of their anthologies. The resonances of that term feel off to me. Like, brief calls to mind, idk, a Zoom call between a freelance marketing consultant and a client, rather than a literary undertaking between a writer and editor. And as the report points out, anthology calls and publications with these hyperspecific expectations seem especially vulnerable to Bella Chacha & Co. for just this reason.³ Like “an essay where a student has sat with the mark scheme and carefully checked off every box.”

Between "briefs" and "wish lists", one wonders: at what point are you, the target, writing the AI scammers' prompts for them? The whole submissions process becomes one big attack surface. What to do?

Maybe magazines should go back to those pretentious, impenetrable guidelines people liked to make fun of not so long ago. You know, the whole “send us your plangent jewels, your most traumatic dumps, your incandescent missives fired straight at the heart of the galaxy, send stories that will murder us and send us to heaven and make us jackslap God" and all that. Or maybe negative prescriptions a la Clarkesworld's hard sells or Strange Horizons' old “stories we see too often” list have strategic value here. Maybe it's better for everyone involved if editors tell writers what they don't want to read as opposed to what they do want. Maybe that would be harder to reverse-engineer into a thousand scam stories. Because as we're seeing, if you have a very specific thing you're asking writers to produce for you, the plagiarism bots can and will produce it, and they will upload reams and reams of that crap to your Moksha portal.

The anxiety is not just on the editors' side. Writers are upset, seeing stories they wrote with their own hand and their own human mind get passed over in favor of some simple-simon AI box-ticking. Worse, people are getting in their heads about rule-of-three, em-dashes, “not x, but y”. (The entire concept of zeugma as a literary device may be a no-go for at least the next two to five years.) Folks are scared they might be giving off "false-positive" vibes, and the only advice i have to offer can be summarized in these two words: Git Gud.

Surely, we can hold ourselves to a higher standard. We can exercise more judgment judgment with how we use our narrative and prosistic tools, be it zeugma or whatever. We can, at the very least, avoid that meaningless metaphor-vapor⁴ that LLMs (and some readers) can't help but fall for. We can create out of an urgency that comes from ourselves, and not simply to "meet" someone else's "brief".

Because ultimately, to borrow Thomas Ha's wording in "The Mub", these AI scam stories suck shit.

(I've read a couple and can confirm, they suck absolute dog shit.)

It is our job, nay, our duty as human writers to not do that. And if editors can't tell the difference or worse, aren't interested in that difference, well, the embarrassing fuckery is gonna keep on happening.

Ugh. I feel like I should try to end this on a positive, conciliatory note so let me say I appreciate the openness displayed by magazines and publishers in publically admitting having got got. And while the ‘tells’ will be a moving target as time goes on, I think the breakdown of characteristics of LLM prose in the Bona Books report is very insightful and useful in helping identify the slop in cases of doubt. We are all gonna have to Share Our Notes on this going forward, and this is a good start

In closing let me emphasize I think 👏We 👏Can 👏And 👏Should 👏All 👏Do 👏Better, but then again I also thought that way before all this AI bullshit. That, however, is a topic for another overlong newsletter

Not-story recs: "Too Much Paranoias", Devo and "Got", Mos Def

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